All set! Evidence of simultaneous attentional control settings for multiple target colors

Although models of visual search have often assumed that attention can only be set for a single feature or property at a time, recent studies have suggested that it may be possible to maintain more than one attentional control setting. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether spatial attention could be guided by multiple attentional control settings for color. In a standard spatial cueing task, participants searched for either of two colored targets accompanied by an irrelevantly colored distractor. Across five experiments, results consistently showed that nonpredictive cues matching either target color produced a significant spatial cueing effect, while irrelevantly colored cues did not. This was the case even when the target colors could not be linearly separated from irrelevantly cue colors in color space, suggesting that participants were not simply adopting one general color set that included both target colors. The results could not be explained by intertrial priming by previous targets, nor could they be explained by a single inhibitory set for the distractor color. Overall, the results are most consistent with the maintenance of multiple attentional control settings.