Recent evidence suggests that attentional capture is contingent on the attentional control setting induced by the task demands (C.L. Folk, R. Remington & J.C. Johnston, 1992). Because the experiments on which these conclusions are based be criticized for several reasons, the contingent capture hypothesis was tested using 2 visual search tasks in which subjects searched multielement displays in which a color singleton and onset singleton were simultaneously present. Both experiments show that the contingent capture hypothesis does not hold: Irrespective of atentional set, attention was captures by the most salient singleton. The findings suggest a stimulus-driven model of performance in which selection is basically determined by the properties of the featural singletons present in the visual field.
Abstract