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Citation |
Reeder RR, van Zoest W, Peelen MV. Atten. Percept. Psychophys. 2015; 77(4): 1070-1080. |
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Affiliation |
Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento, Corso Bettini 31, 38068, Rovereto, TN, Italy. |
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Copyright |
(Copyright © 2015, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group) |
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DOI |
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PMID |
25810159 |
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Abstract |
Theories of visual search postulate that the selection of targets amongst distractors involves matching visual input to a top-down attentional template. Previous work has provided evidence that feature-based attentional templates affect visual processing globally across the visual field. In the present study, we asked whether more naturalistic, category-level attentional templates also modulate visual processing in a spatially global and obligatory way. Subjects were cued to detect people or cars in a diverse set of photographs of real-world scenes. On a subset of trials, silhouettes of people and cars appeared in search-irrelevant locations that subjects were instructed to ignore, and subjects were required to respond to the location of a subsequent dot probe. In three experiments, results showed a consistency effect on dot-probe trials: dot probes were detected faster when they appeared in the location of the cued category compared with the non-cued category, indicating attentional capture by template-matching stimuli. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that this capture was involuntary: consistency effects persisted under conditions in which attending to silhouettes of the cued category was detrimental to performance. Experiment 3 tested whether these effects could be attributed to non-attentional effects related to the processing of the category cues. Language: en |