Abstract
When attention is captured by a salient distractor during visual search, consequences such as increased response times and decreased accuracy have been well documented. However, less is understood about the consequences of attentional capture on feature perception. Chen, Leber, & Golomb (2019) previously showed that simultaneously presenting target and distractor cues can result in two distinct types of feature-binding errors: swapping and repulsion errors. However, capture is a dynamic process – how does the pattern of these feature-binding errors change across the time course of attentional capture? To measure this, we conducted a series of experiments in which we varied the presentation delay between the distractor and target cues and used probabilistic mixture modelling to characterize the magnitude of each source of error made in each delay condition. In Experiment 1, we presented the salient distractor either 50ms or 150ms prior to the target, and in Experiment 2, we tested an additional 500ms-delay condition along with the previous 50ms- and 150ms-delay conditions. E2 also included further modifications, e.g., manipulating trial proportions such that the salient distractor was if anything anti-predictive of the target location. Across all conditions swapping errors were lower in E2 compared to E1, but in both experiments, swapping errors were strongest and significant in the 50ms-delay condition, whereas repulsion was significant only in the 150ms-delay condition. In the 500ms-delay neither swapping errors nor repulsion was significant. Additionally, when comparing overall performance as measured by the probability of reporting the target, we found evidence of the distractor (pre-cue) capturing attention in the 50ms- and 150ms-delay conditions but observed an inhibition of return signature in the 500ms-delay condition. Overall, these results show that swapping and repulsion errors induced by attentional capture follow independent time-courses that suggest the possibility of different underlying processes.