Top-down and bottom-up attentional control: On the nature of interference from a salient distractor

In two experiments using spatial probes, we measured the temporal and spatial interactions between top-down control of attention and bottom-up interference from a salient distracter in visual search. The subjects searched for a square among circles, ignoring color: Probe response times showed that a color singleton distracter could draw attention to its location in the early stage of visual processing (before a 100-msec stimulus onset asynchrony [SOA]), but only when the color singleton distracter was located far from the target. Apparently the bottom-up activation of the singleton distracter's location is affected early on by local interactions with nearby stimulus locations. Moreover, probe results showed that a singleton distracter did not receive attention after extended practice. These results suggest that top-down control of attention is possible at an early stage of visual processing. In the long-SOA condition (150-msec SOA), spatial attention selected the target location over distracter locations, and this tendency occurred with or without extended practice.