Avoidance of capture by motion onset

TL;DR

The paper shows that attention can avoid being captured by sudden motion, similar to how it can ignore bright colors in visual search.

Contribution

This is the first study to demonstrate that attentional capture by motion onset can be avoided.

Findings

Irrelevant motion onsets are salient and can impair visual search performance.

Motion-onset distractors had no effect when searching for a specific shape, indicating capture was avoided.

Results were replicated and confirmed with additional probe trials.

Abstract

Recent research has shown that salient items can sometimes be suppressed or ignored during visual search. The findings may help resolve apparently contradictory findings in the attention literature. Suppression of salient items, however, has been shown almost exclusively for color singletons, despite the fact that many other visual attributes can also render an item to be salient. We show here, for the first time, that attentional capture by motion onset can also be prevented. In Experiment 1, using an additional singleton task in which suppression is not expected, we confirmed that irrelevant motion onsets are salient and can impair visual search performance. In Experiment 2, we included motion-onset distractors in the search for a prespecified shape. In that task the motion-onset distractor had no effect on performance, indicating that attentional capture by it had been avoided. Finally, in Experiment 3, we replicated the results from Experiment 2 and additionally included probe trials that also revealed avoidance of motion-onset capture. The findings help to generalize and provide support for theories of attentional suppression and avoidance of capture by salient stimuli.

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