Involuntary Orienting of Attention to Irrelevant Task Goals.

Abstract

Attention overcomes processing limitations by enhancing information relevant to task goals and suppressing distraction. Although researchers agree that task goals are stored in memory, it is unclear how attention and memory are linked at the moment that a goal-related stimulus is detected, thereby capturing attention. We predicted that 1) attention capture leads to an involuntary orientation of attention to the related goal in memory; and 2) only a single goal can be attended during attention capture, consistent with a memory model that posits a “focus of attention” possessing a capacity limit of one. Our findings in Chapter 2 support our first prediction: participants oriented attention to the wrong task goal when instructed by an irrelevant but salient stimulus to do so. The set-specific capture phenomenon identified in Chapter 3 is also consistent with the first prediction, and supports the second. When participants searched for visual targets matching either of two current goals (e.g., identify both green and orange letters), identification accuracy was much lower when the target and an immediately preceding distractor were different target colors (e.g., green and orange) than when they were the same color (e.g., green). In Chapter 4, we reported that this set-specific capture cost could be eliminated when participants focused attention on the goal related to the target (e.g., green) prior to the appearance of a distractor relating to a different goal (e.g., orange). In line with the second prediction, this result suggests that only one goal can be enhanced at a time. Chapter 5’s results provided direct support for our second hypothesis: only the most recently attended goal influenced current target identification, whereas previously attended goals did not. This result is only explained by the focus of attention model, and cannot be explained by an alternative graded, limited-resources model. Collectively, these studies provide a novel link between attention and memory when multiple goals guide behavior.