Attention capture by abrupt onsets: re-visiting the priority tag model

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Abrupt visual onsets are known to capture attention in a bottom-up manner.
• The exact mechanism of attention capture by onsets is debated, with the new object account suggesting it signals new object appearance.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the precise mechanism of attention capture by abrupt onsets.
• To resolve the confound between the number of onsets and display size in previous studies.

Main Methods:

• A visual search task was employed with a fixed display size of eight items.
• The number of onsets was systematically varied from zero to eight across experiments.
• Reaction times were measured to assess attention capture.

Main Results:

• Reaction times increased systematically with the number of onsets.
• This increase was more pronounced when the target was an onset, suggesting only one onset is prioritized.
• Even with visual cues (red color), many participants prioritized only one onset.
• Selective search was only observed when onset and non-onset targets were blocked.

Conclusions:

• The findings support a model where only a single abrupt onset automatically captures attention.
• This single-capture mechanism is consistent with various bottom-up attention models, such as saliency and masking accounts.