ReviewJournal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance2025
Attentional capture by abrupt onsets: Foundations and emerging issues.
Review in Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Ten years Diffusion Model for Conflict (DMC) tasks: Theoretical foundations, applications, practical recommendations, and open challenges.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Signal suppression makes search less effortful.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Signal suppression 2.0: An updated account of attentional capture and suppression.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Are abrupt onsets highly salient?Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2025Article
- Instructional design complexity and pop-up notification interference: effects on attention allocation and information retention in virtual classrooms.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The study of attentional allocation due to external stimulation has a long history in psychology. Early research by Yantis and Jonides suggested that abrupt onsets constitute a unique class of stimuli that captures attention in a stimulus-driven fashion unless attention is proactively directed elsewhere. Since then, the study of visual attention has evolved significantly. This article revisits the core conclusions by Yantis and Jonides in light of subsequent findings and highlights emerging issues for future investigation. These issues include clarifying key concepts of visual attention, adopting measures with greater spatiotemporal precision, exploring how past experiences modulate the effects of abrupt onsets, and understanding individual differences in attentional allocation. Addressing these issues is challenging but crucial, and we offer some perspectives on how one might choose to study these issues going forward. Finally, we call for more investigation into abrupt onsets. Perhaps due to their strong potential to capture attention, abrupt onsets are often set aside in pursuit of other conditions that show attenuation of distractor interference. However, given their real-world relevance, abrupt onsets represent the exact type of stimuli that we need to study more to connect laboratory attention research to real life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.