The roles of feature-specific task set and bottom-up salience in attentional capture: An ERP study

Eimer, M., Kiss, M., Press, C. and Sauter, D. (2009) The roles of feature-specific task set and bottom-up salience in attentional capture: An ERP study. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance, 35 (5). pp. 1316-1328. ISSN 0096-1523 doi: 10.1037/a0015872

Abstract/Summary

We investigated the roles of top-down task set and bottom-up stimulus salience for feature-specific attentional capture. Spatially nonpredictive cues preceded search arrays that included a color-defined target. For target-color singleton cues, behavioral spatial cueing effects were accompanied by cueinduced N2pc components, indicative of attentional capture. These effects were only minimally attenuated for nonsingleton target-color cues, underlining the dominance of top-down task set over salience in attentional capture. Nontarget-color singleton cues triggered no N2pc, but instead an anterior N2 component indicative of top-down inhibition. In Experiment 2, inverted behavioral cueing effects of these cues were accompanied by a delayed N2pc to targets at cued locations, suggesting that perceptually salient but task-irrelevant visual events trigger location-specific inhibition mechanisms that can delay subsequent target selection.