Citation

Wienrich C, Janczyk M. Atten. Percept. Psychophys. 2011; 73(7): 2044-2052.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology and Ergonomics, Berlin Institute of Technology, Franklinstraße 28/29, 10587, Berlin, Germany, carolin.wienrich@tu-berlin.de.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.3758/s13414-011-0183-x

PMID

21805210

Abstract

The notion of a singleton versus a feature search mode (Bacon & Egeth, 1994) in visual search is generally widely accepted. Yet Theeuwes (2004) claimed a different, potentially more parsimonious position. He suggested that the size of an attentional window is under top-down control and that salient distractors within this window capture attention. We report on four experiments. The first two experiments represent our various initial attempts to replicate the crucial Experiment 1 in the Theeuwes (2004) study, all of which were not successful. In Experiment 3, we showed that our distractor was able to yield attentional capture in a situation promoting the use of the singleton search mode (Bacon & Egeth, 1994). Experiment 4 was similar to Experiment 1 but incorporated further details that may account for the discrepant findings. Still, no attentional capture was found. In sum, it was not possible to replicate a crucial piece of evidence for the attentional window hypothesis, and our results are more consistent with the assumption of two different search modes.

Language: en