A Critique of the Attentional Window Account of Capture Failures

Abstract

There has been a lengthy debate about whether salient stimuli have the power to automatically capture attention, even when entirely task irrelevant. Theeuwes (2022) has suggested that an attentional window account could explain why capture is observed in some studies, but not others. According to this account, when search is difficult, participants narrow their attentional window, and this prevents the salient distractor from generating a saliency signal. In turn, this causes the salient distractor to fail to capture attention. In the present commentary, we describe two major problems with this account. First, the attentional window account proposes that attention must be focused so narrowly that featural information from the salient distractor will be filtered prior to saliency computations. However, many previous studies observing no capture provided evidence that featural processing was sufficiently detailed to guide attention toward the target shape. This indicates that the attentional window was sufficiently broad to allow featural processing. Second, the attentional window account proposes that capture should occur more readily in easy search tasks than difficult search tasks. We review previous studies that violate this basic prediction of the attentional window account. A more parsimonious account of the data is that control over feature processing can be exerted proactively to prevent capture, at least under certain conditions.

Keywords: attention; attentional capture; attentional window account; suppression.

Figure 1

Previous studies showing guidance toward the target shape, which seems indicates that featural information was not filtered by focusing attention as claimed by the attentional window account. (A) First eye movements from Gaspelin et al. (2017, Exp. 3) clearly showed a bias toward the target shape above levels of the other nonsingleton distractors. Specifically, the heat map shows that the vast majority of first saccades went to the target location. (B) ERPs from Stillwell et al. (2022, Exp. 2) show clear evidence of an N2pc elicited by the target shape, suggesting that the target shape was preferentially attended compared to other shapes.

Figure 2

Search displays and search slopes for (A) Wang and Theeuwes (2020) and (B) Gaspelin et al (2015). Both searches produced steep slopes indicative of a difficult search. Yet, these studies obtained differing results regarding attentional capture by a salient distractor.