Implicit Pattern Detection and Attention Capture

Attention Capture , Orienting , and Awareness

Attention capture by faces.

We report three experiments that investigate whether faces are capable of capturing attention when in competition with other non-face objects. In Experiment 1a participants took longer to decide that an array of objects contained a butterfly target when a face appeared as one of the distracting items than when the face did not appear in the array. This irrelevant face effect was eliminated when...

Perceptual objects capture attention

A recent study has demonstrated that the mere organization of some elements in the visual field into an object attracts attention automatically [Kimchi, R., Yeshurun, Y., & Cohen-Savransky, A. (2007). Automatic, stimulus-driven attentional capture by objecthood. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14(1), 166-172]. We tested whether similar results will emerge when the target is not a part of the obj...

Valuable Orientations Capture Attention.

Visual attention has long been known to be drawn to stimuli that are physically salient or congruent with task-specific goals. Several recent studies have shown that attention is also captured by stimuli that are neither salient nor task-relevant, but that are rendered in a color that has previously been associated with reward. We investigated whether another feature dimension-orientation-can b...

Auditory attentional capture: implicit and explicit approaches.

The extent to which distracting items capture attention despite being irrelevant to the task at hand can be measured either implicitly or explicitly (e.g., Simons, Trends Cogn Sci 4:147-155, 2000). Implicit approaches include the standard attentional capture paradigm in which distraction is measured in terms of reaction time and/or accuracy costs within a focal task in the presence (vs. absence...