Much ado about nothing: Capturing attention toward locations without new perceptual events.

Popular frameworks of attention propose that visual orienting occurs through a combination of bottom-up (stimulus-driven) and top-down (goal-directed) processes. Much of the basic research on these processes adheres paradigmatically to experimental methods that introduce salient but task-irrelevant stimuli (objects or transients) to the visual environment to determine whether attention is captured to their locations. This common practice of changing or adding a stimulus to a location to determine whether it captures attention reflects a notion that locations at which new features or stimuli spontaneously appear are prioritized above all else. In this article, we challenge this notion with results from a modified additional singleton paradigm. In the critical condition, following a preview array of placeholder stimuli, 1 placeholder stimulus transforms into a target diamond and changes luminance at the same time that all other placeholders, except 1 (the truly "static singleton") change in luminance. This static singleton location, which involves neither a new stimulus nor any sensory transient, produces a clear pattern of attentional capture originating near its location. These findings violate multiple bottom-up and top-down perspectives while encouraging a new approach to studying attentional capture. (PsycINFO Database Record