Contingent attentional capture occurs by activated target congruence (original) (raw)

Attentional selection of information from a stimulus array is controlled in at least two distinct ways . One way involves the viewer's ability to control what regions or objects should be selected on the basis of the viewer's goals or intentions (i.e., goal-directed, or top-down, selection). The other way is stimulus-driven, or bottom-up, selection, which refers to the fact that certain properties of a stimulus may capture attention independently of the viewer's current goals or intentions. Whereas goal-directed selection generally helps viewers' performance, stimulus-driven selection potentially disrupts it, because needless selection sometimes occurs. This article focuses on an interesting interaction between the viewers' top-down intentions and stimulus-driven attentional selection, which is known as contingent attentional capture. Contingent attentional capture is a phenomenon in which the viewer's attention is driven to select (or is captured by) a stimulus that looks like the current target.