Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Stimuli that are physically salient—e.g., brighter or differently colored to others in the visual scene—capture eye gaze and attention. Many studies have shown that color-singleton distractors slow visual search for a target, even when participants are informed beforehand of the features (e.g., color) of the upcoming distractor. In those studies, however, participants may not have been particularly motivated to recruit attentional processes and try to prevent attentional distraction by upcoming stimuli. In the current study we investigated whether participants could use pre-trial information about the color of an upcoming distractor to prevent themselves from getting distracted by it, when a reward was at stake. Results showed that a performance-contingent reward reduced overall distraction by physically salient stimuli. However, reward did not increase the likelihood that participants would use information about the color of the upcoming distractor to further improve visual search performance. This study highlights the fast and reflexive nature of attentional capture by physically salient distractors, which is difficult to control strategically, even when motivated to do so.