Nancy Carlisle¹, Greta Manini²; ¹Lehigh University, ²Universita di Verona

Attention researchers often split the world into targets and distractors, but in the real world we may learn that certain information probabilistically cues a target through our experience. It is unclear how selection history effects interact with attentional top-down control settings. We manipulated the relevance of salient items by changing how frequently a salient item was a target vs. a distractor across groups (0%-100%; 50%-50%, or 100%-0%). Participants completed a singleton detection task where attention control should already be tuned to attend to salient items and a feature-search task where attention should be directed to a target feature and salient items are ignored. We found more attention is directed to the salient item as relevance increases, with larger costs for salient distractors and larger benefits for salient target compared to search trials where no salient item appears. Importantly, in this study we included contingent capture stimuli that could either match the color of the salient item or another color to determine if the salient item color is becoming a part of a top-down task set, or whether participants are shifting how much attention they are directing to salience. In singleton detection mode, increasing relevance led to increasing contingent capture for both salient item color match and non-match stimuli, suggesting a graded increase in attention towards salience. In feature detection mode, we found a contingent capture effect only for the highest level of relevance, but still found similar capture for both salient item color match and non-match stimuli, once again suggesting this was a shift in attentional control towards salience instead of incorporating the salient item color into a top-down control set. These findings highlight that attentional control settings can be flexibly altered to direct more attention towards salience, as the relevance of salience increases in a task.

Acknowledgements: 1R15EY030247