Temporal expectations modulate attentional capture.

Abstract

Subjects' ability to override attentional capture by salient distractors during singleton search has been attributed to the adoption of an attentional set for the type of discontinuity characterizing the target (Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992) or to fast disengagement of attention from the salient distractor's location (Theeuwes, Atchley, & Kramer, 2000). The present results support an alternative account by showing that temporal expectancies modulate attentional capture. In a color singleton search, an irrelevant onset preceding the target by a given time interval produced capture when the distractor-to-target interval varied unpredictably but failed to do so when this interval was predictable. Moreover, with unpredictable intervals and moderately salient stimuli, capture was overridden at the expected average interval. These findings invite caution when stimulus onset asynchrony manipulations are used to study the temporal deployment of attention, since they demonstrate that such manipulations introduce powerful temporal expectations.