Schedule of Events | Symposia

The Role of Visual Noise Complexity in Attentional Capture and Hold

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Sepideh Hedayati¹ (sepidehh@unc.edu), Hannah L. Morgan², Joseph B. Hopfinger¹; ¹University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, ²Duke University School of Medicine

The transition from the initial, automatic orienting of attention (i.e., “capture”) to the more sustained holding of attention, and the influence of stimuli characteristics on these processes, remains unclear. We investigated these dynamics across four experiments with different types of neutral (“noise”) stimuli and varying stimulus-onset asynchronies. Participants completed dot-probe tasks, across four different experiments in which pictures of faces or places were paired with visual noise images created by scrambling the face and place pictures. Results revealed that measures of attentional capture and hold were significantly influenced by characteristics of the noise stimuli. Specifically, the typical finding of attentional capture to faces or places was dependent upon the pixelation size of the scrambled noise images. Attention was captured to place stimuli when the noise stimuli were less pixelated, but the noise stimuli captured attention, over the place stimuli, at higher levels of pixelation. These findings provide new insights that subtle variations in the neutral stimuli significantly affect measures of attentional focus. These results challenge the assumption that faces automatically capture attention and may be more consistent with contingent capture theories (Folk et al., 1994), since the match between low-level features of the distractor and target affected measures of capture. The present results also provide evidence that the involuntary holding of attention by faces versus places follows a different time course. These results further our understanding of how ‘neutral’ stimuli, as well as meaningful stimuli such as faces and places, significantly shape the involuntary dynamics of attentional capture and hold.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Spatial