Chapter Eight - The Control of Visual Attention: Toward a Unified Account

Visual attention is deployed through visual scenes to find behaviorally relevant targets. This attentional deployment-or attentional control-can be based on either stimulus factors, such as the salience of an object or region, or goal relevance, such as the match between an object and the target being searched for. Decades of research have measured attentional control by examining attentional interruption by a completely irrelevant distracting object, which may or may not capture attention. Based on the results of attentional capture tasks, the literature has distilled two alternative views of attentional control and capture: one focused on stimulus-driven factors and the other based on goal-driven factors. In the current paper, we propose an alternative in which stimulus-driven control and goal-driven control are not mutually exclusive but instead related through task dynamics, specifically experience. Attentional control is initially stimulus-driven. However, as participants gain experience with all aspects of a task, attentional control rapidly becomes increasingly goal-driven. We present four experiments that examine this experience-dependent attentional tuning. We show that to resist capture and be highly selective based on target properties, attention must be configured to aspects of a task through experience.