Attentional capture in serial visual and audiovisual search tasks
Poster Presentation

Polly Dalton
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford

Nilli Lavie
Department of Psychology, University College London

Charles Spence
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford

     Abstract ID Number: 47
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: March 16, 2005
     Presentation date: 06/06/2005 11:30 AM in MART Auditorium
     (View Schedule)

Abstract
The phenomenon of attentional capture by unique yet irrelevant “singleton” distractors has typically been studied in spatial visual search tasks. Recently, however, Dalton and Lavie (2004) demonstrated that auditory attention could also be captured by a singleton item in a rapidly-presented sequence of tones. In the present research, we investigated whether these findings extend to serial search tasks using either visual or audiovisual stimuli. Participants had to search a centrally-presented visual stream for targets defined on a particular dimension (e.g. size). Task performance was compared in the presence versus absence of a singleton distractor that was unique on an irrelevant dimension (e.g. duration). Both visual and auditory singleton distractors interfered with visual task performance. However, if the singleton feature coincided with the target item, search was facilitated. These results suggest that visual attention can be captured both by visual and by auditory singleton items in nonspatial search tasks.