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The present study investigated whether faces capture attention regardless of attentional set. The presentation of a face as a distractor during a visual search has been shown to impair performance relative to when the face was absent, implying that faces automatically attract attention. If attentional control is contingent on the observer's current goal, faces should not capture attention when they are irrelevant to the observer's attentional set. Previous studies demonstrating face-induced attentional capture used faces that were relevant to the task. Thus, a task in which faces were completely irrelevant to the observer's set was created. Participants identified a target letter among heterogeneously colored non-targets while ignoring a peripheral facial image that appeared as a brief distractor. No face-specific capture was observed when the target-distractor stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was long (Experiment 1). When the SOA was shortened, attentional capture by irrelevant faces was observed (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 extended this finding to all conditions, regardless of the attractiveness of faces. No such capture effect was found in Experiment 4 with inverted-face distractors. These results indicate that completely task-irrelevant faces break through top-down attentional set given a brief distractor-target SOA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the effect of false memory on temporal perception. The Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm, which elicits false recognition of a nonpresented word, was used to determine whether the perceived duration of falsely remembered words was longer than that for control words. The study results revealed that the perceived duration for falsely recognized words was longer than that for correctly rejected words. This is the first study to show the effect of false memory on temporal perception and suggests that temporal perception can be affected by conceptual fluency without any perceptual repetition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identification of the second of two targets is impaired if it is presented less than about 500 ms after the first. Three models of this second-target deficit, known as attentional blink (AB), were compared:resource-depletion, bottleneck, and temporary loss of control (TLC). Five experiments, in which three sequential targets were inserted in a stream of distractors, showed that identification accuracy for the leading target depended on an attentional switch whose magnitude varied with distractor–target similarity. In contrast, accuracy for the trailing target depended on similarity between the target and the trailing mask. These results strongly suggest that the AB is not a unitary phenomenon. Resource-depletion was ruled out as a viable account. The effect of attentional switching was handled naturally by the TLC model, while bottleneck models offered the best account of the effect of backward masking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identification of the second of two targets is impaired if it is presented less than about 500 ms after the first. Theoretical accounts of this second-target deficit, known asattentional blink(AB), have relied on some form of limited attentional resource that is allocated to the leading target at the expense of the trailing target. Three experiments in the present study reveal a failure of resource-limitation accounts to explain why the AB is absent when the targets consist of a stream of three items belonging to the same category (e.g., letters or digits). The AB is reinstated, however, if an item from a different category is inserted in the target string. This result, and all major results in the AB literature, is explained by the hypothesis that the AB arises from a temporary loss of control over the prevailing attentional set. This lapse in control renders the observer vulnerable to an exogenously-triggered switch in attentional set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perception of the second of two rapidly sequential targets is impaired if the temporal lag between them is relatively short. This attentional blink (AB) is said to occur because the first target preoccupies attentional resources, leading to a shortage of attention for, and subsequent failure of judgement of, the second target. In the present study, we examined whether the attention which is preoccupied by the first target carries the common characteristic of spatial attention, that is local facilitation of information processing. To index the facilitation, we presented an attention-sensitive probe known as the shooting line illusion in which observers see a progressively drawn line from the attended end to the other. We found that illusory motion was perceived to emanate from the end where the first target was presented. This result demonstrates the inherently spatial nature of attention, even when it is defined by temporal and symbolic variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]