The control of attention by abrupt visual onsets and offsets

A letter can be presented visually either by the abrupt appearance of lines that make up the letter (onset transient) or by the abrupt disappearance of extra lines from a form in which the letter is embedded (offset transient). Recent evidence from visual-search tasks has suggested that onset transients have absolute priority over offset transients with respect to the allocation of visual attention. Specifically, these studies have found that a single onset-transient target letter pops out of a background of offset-transient distractor letters (i.e., time to detect the target is independent of the number of distractors), which indicates that attention is automatically directed to the location of an onset-transient stimulus even when there are competing offset transients (Yantis & Jonides, 1984). Because of the way the offset letters were created, however, the total display change (number of offset line-segments plus number of onset line-segments) was greater for onset than for offset letters. Thus, onset targets might have popped out because they produced greater overall display changes rather than because they were the only letters with onset transients. In the present study, a figure that included more offset-transient line segments in the offset-transient letters was used. Under these conditions, onset-transient targets did not pop out of a background of offset-transient distractors. It is suggested that visual attention may be influenced by total display change and, therefore, that onset transients are not necessarily sufficient to control attention when there are many competing offset transients.