[The effect of stimulus-driven factor on attentional capture: evidence from visual search paradigm containing static...

The present study investigated the nature of attentional control when the stimulus display contained both static and dynamic items. Subjects searched for a target defined by color presented among nontargets, one of which was a distractor with a unique feature in a different stimulus dimension. Experiment 1 showed that the presence of a distractor with a task irrelevant form hindered identification of the color-defined target. When it was easy to distinguish the target from the other items, this attentional capture was not observed even if the display contained a motion distractor (Experiment 2). Decreasing the saliency of a target color yielded the attentional capture by a motion distractor and interfered target identification performance (Experiment 3). These results suggest that the attentional control mainly depends on the stimulus-driven activations caused by differences between features in stimulus dimensions whether the target and the distractor are defined by static or dynamic features. In order to explain these findings of the attentional capture, a possibility for proposing the single activation map model was discussed.