ArticleVisual cognition
First encounters: Estimating the initial magnitude of attentional capture.
Article in Visual cognition. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- 35+ years of the additional singleton task: Design features and guidelines.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Review
- Cue-driven attentional guidance nearly eliminates salience effects in working memory.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2026Article
- Contributions of Distinct Attention Mechanisms to Saccadic Choices in a Gamified, Dynamic Environment.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Signal suppression 2.0: An updated account of attentional capture and suppression.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Contributions of distinct attention mechanisms to saccadic choices in a gamified, dynamic environment.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Learned distractor rejection: Robust but surprisingly rapid.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Salient but irrelevant information often captures our attention. To quantify attentional capture in the lab, participants typically complete dozens or hundreds of trials that contain salient distractors. However, presenting distractors frequently may also incidentally introduce a secondary task-set to resist distraction. In everyday life, we typically encounter distractions once, not dozens of times, creating a disconnect between capture in the lab and in the world. Here, we had a simple but important question: how large is capture when participants encounter a salient distractor for the very first time? We used a larger-than-typical sample size combined with a single capture trial (Exp 1 N = 970, Exp 2 N = 1025), and found that initial capture was ~9x-15x larger than the average size of capture in typical laboratory tasks (~370-580 ms). We also found evidence that initial capture was modulated by long- and short-term stimulus history, consistent with emerging theories about how history shapes attention. Our results suggest that participants are surprisingly successful at ignoring distractors in the lab, and that "one-shot" estimates may better reflect the full cost of capture by salient distractors.
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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.