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ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Category‐based attentional capture can be influenced by color‐ and shape‐dimensions independently in the conjunction search task

Xia Wu

Faculty of Psychology, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China

Key Research Base of Humanities and Social Sciences of Ministry of Education, Academy of Psychology and Behavior, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China

Center of Collaborative Innovation for Assessment and Promotion of Mental Health, Tianjin, China

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Xinxuan Wang

Faculty of Psychology, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China

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Rami Saab

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

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Yunpeng Jiang

Corresponding Author

E-mail address: jiangyp@tjnu.edu.cn

Faculty of Psychology, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China

Key Research Base of Humanities and Social Sciences of Ministry of Education, Academy of Psychology and Behavior, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China

Center of Collaborative Innovation for Assessment and Promotion of Mental Health, Tianjin, China

Correspondence

Yunpeng Jiang, Department of Psychology, Academy of Psychology and Behavior, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China.

Email: jiangyp@tjnu.edu.cn

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First published: 17 January 2020

Abstract

Attention can be involuntarily attracted by a distractor that matches the current attentional control settings (ACSs). However, it remains unclear whether two category‐specific ACSs can operate independently. By defining a target as a combination of two prototype‐based categories, the present event‐related potential (ERP) study investigated how color‐category and shape‐category ACSs operate within a search task paradigm and the effects of temporal task demands on these ACSs. The matching level between target and distractor was manipulated to separate the effects of each ACS. The relative position between target and distractor was employed to isolate the attentional processing of the distractor from the target. Furthermore, two display durations were used to manipulate the temporal task demands, including a short fixed window (800 ms) and a dynamic window extended until the user responded. Our results support a two‐stage selection scenario. In early stage, the color‐ and shape‐ACS independently guided attention to task‐relevant property (N2pc components) and suppressed attention toward task‐irrelevant properties (PD components). In late stage, these two independent ACSs were integrated into a holistic ACS to interfere with the consolidation (contralateral delay activity components) and behavioral performance (accuracy and RTs) of target identification. Moreover, an early N1/P1 component might reflect a preattentive enhancement of relevant information or a preattentive suppression of irrelevant objects. These two category‐specific ACSs weights differently in varied temporal task demands. These findings support the idea that independent early processing is followed by integrated late processing, which can be applied to category‐based attentional capture with different temporal task demands.

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