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Electrophysiological Evidence of the Capture of Visual Attention

¹ Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, ² Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada

Reprint requests should be sent to Clayton Hickey or John J. McDonald, Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, Canada V5A 1S6, or via e-mail: cmhickey@sfu.ca or jmcd@sfu.ca.

We investigated the ability of salient yet task-irrelevant stimuli to capture attention in two visual search experiments. Participants were presented with circular search arrays that contained a highly salient distractor singleton defined by color and a less salient target singleton defined by form. A component of the event-related potential called the N2pc was used to track the allocation of attention to lateralized positions in the arrays. In Experiment 1, a lateralized distractor elicited an N2pc when a concurrent target was presented on the vertical meridian and thus could not elicit lateralized components such as the N2pc. A similar distractor-elicited N2pc was found in Experiment 2, which was conducted to rule out certain voluntary search strategies. Additionally, in Experiment 2 both the distractor and the target elicited the N2pc component when the two stimuli were presented on opposite sides of the search array. Critically, the distractor-elicited N2pc preceded the target-elicited N2pc on these trials. These results demonstrate that participants shifted attention to the target only after shifting attention to the more salient but task-irrelevant distractor. This pattern of results is in line with theories of attention in which stimulus-driven control plays an integral role.

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