Do temporal information processing limitations share cognitive causes? A correlational study of different attentional forms and modalities

Selective attention can be directed according to behavioral goals or grabbed by salient stimuli. Whether controlled in a goal-directed or stimulus-driven fashion, attention has a dark side: Unattended items are frequently missed. Such failures have been explored through numerous experimental paradigms across sensory modalities, but their relationships have been incompletely characterized. In two experiments, we adopted an individual differences approach to better understand the common and dissociable cognitive components in temporal attention paradigms. In Experiment 1, participants (n=56) were tested twice on the attentional blink (goal-directed attention), surprise-induced blindness (stimulus-driven attention), and their auditory analogues. Despite strong effect reliability and significant within-modality correlations across effects, we found no significant correlations across modalities. In Experiment 2, participants (n=52) completed different versions of the visual tasks and a contingent capture task, whose deficit has been ascribed to both goal-directed and stimulus-driven components. Using exploratory factor analyses and partial correlations, we found that capture-related deficits accounted for the modest relationship between blink and surprise effects. Furthermore, surprise effects strongly habituated, blink effects remained, and capture-related deficits showed an intermediate pattern. We conclude that each attentional paradigm involves multiple cognitive components, some shared and others distinctly related to different attentional forms or sources of control.

TESTING GOAL-DRIVEN CAPTURE BY THREAT

Attention has long been characterised within prominent models as reflecting a competition between goal-driven and stimulus-driven processes. It remains unclear, however, how involuntary attentional capture by affective stimuli, such as threat-laden content, fits into such models. While such effects were traditionally held to reflect stimulus-driven processes, recent research has increasingly implicated a critical role of goal-driven processes. Here we test an alternative goal-driven account of involuntary attentional capture by threat, using an experimental manipulation of goal-driven attention. To this end we combined the classic ‘contingent capture’ and ‘emotion-induced blink’ (EIB) paradigms in an RSVP task with both positive or threatening target search goals. Across six experiments, positive and threat distractors were presented in peripheral, parafoveal, and central locations. Across all distractor locations, we found that involuntary attentional capture by irrelevant threatening distractors could be induced via the adoption of a search goal for a threatening category; adopting a goal for a positive category conversely led to capture only by positive stimuli. Our findings provide direct experimental evidence for a causal role of voluntary goals in involuntary capture by irrelevant threat stimuli, and hence demonstrate the plausibility of a top-down account of this phenomenon. We discuss the implications of these findings in relation to current cognitive models of attention and clinical disorders.