Testing the role of temporal selection for stimulus-driven capture of attention

Stimulus-driven and top-down dependent capture of attention can be observed under very similar conditions, raising the question of the decisive factors for whether one or the other effect is seen. In the current study, we tested the role of temporal selectivity. Studies showing less evidence of stimulus-driven attention by salient color singletons often used sequences of displays, in which the first display contained an irrelevant color cue that could easily be ignored by timed allocation of attention, as the relevant target was consistently presented in a second display only. In contrast, studies showing more evidence of stimulus-driven attention used distractors presented simultaneously with the targets, making it more difficult to simply ignore additional salient distractors at the point in time where the target was presented. Here, we therefore tested stimulus-driven capture under two conditions: with temporal certainty that the first display could safely be ignored and without temporal certainty that the first display could be ignored. Results showed that this manipulation had no significant influence on stimulus-driven capture of attention by irrelevant but salient cues preceding the targets, although the same participants showed more distractor interference by a target-concomitant and salient color singleton. Thus, temporal selection was seemingly not the decisive factor for the amount of stimulus-driven capture of attention.