Attentional capture in serial visual and audiovisual search tasks

Polly Dalton, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford

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.

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