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Guiding attention to fixed-feature singletons: Top-down control settings for features and singletonness.

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Rebecca Carson¹ (), John McDonald¹; ¹Simon Fraser University

Researchers have sought to determine why and when attention is involuntarily captured by salient-but-irrelevant visual objects. According to contingent capture theory, such items will capture attention when they possess a target feature stored in an observer’s attentional control settings. Consistent with this theory, Folk and Remington (1998) found that a green singleton object did not capture attention when participants searched for a red singleton and vice versa. However, Bacon and Egeth (1994) hypothesized that participants search for singletons using a default singleton-detection strategy. According to this view, a green singleton should capture attention when participants search for a red singleton because the attentional control settings are configured for “singletonness.” Here, we hypothesize that (1) the control settings can be configured for both a target’s defining feature and its singletonness, and (2) Folk and Remington’s singletons were not sufficiently salient for participants to incorporate the target’s singletonness into their attentional control settings. We conducted two cueing experiments in which cue and target colours either matched or mismatched (randomly intermixed or blocked). Mismatch cues produced statistically significant validity effects (i.e., faster responses on valid trials than on invalid trials), which indicates that the target’s singletonness was stored in the attentional control settings. Match cues produced significantly larger validity effects, which indicates that the target’s colour was also stored in the control settings. These findings are interpreted in terms of a flexible attention control system that can use multiple first-order and higher-order features to guide attention to potential objects of interest.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Other