Abstract
This study suggests that attention is only automatically drawn to an item when temporal discontinuity makes it salient. When a stimulus is highly salient only because of form differences the attention attraction property does not longer hold. Since the salient items in both experiments can be considered as highly conspicuous according to several definitions, the present results necessitate a revision of the concept of conspicuity. It shows that automatic atten- tion attraction cannot longer be considered as a fundamental property of conspicuity.