Sabhyata Prakash, “Attention to Colors and Objects: A Stimulus Norming Experiment”
Mentor: Deborah Hannula, Psychology
Poster #106

Sometimes, our attention is captured by distracting information in the environment. Studies that examine attention capture in the lab have focused on the physical salience of distracting information. However, recent studies from our lab suggest that attention is also captured by items stored in long-term memory. To avoid the potential influence of stimulus-specific confounds in this work, it is important that the materials we use in our studies are well-matched for physical salience and their ability to attract attention. The current norming experiment will use eye-tracking measures to determine whether a new set of stimulus materials differ in their ability to attract attention. Participants in this experiment will be instructed to make a single eye movement to the location of a color target (e.g., a red circle). The target will be presented with 5 distractors (i.e., gray circles) on the circumference of an imaginary circle equidistant from each other and the screen center. In half of the trials, one of the distractors in the search display will be replaced with a simple object (e.g., gray line drawing of an apple) – a critical distractor – that should be ignored. Targets and critical distractors, which will be equated for luminance and matched for size will be presented in each search display location equally often across trials and will either be directly adjacent, one item apart, or two items apart. Saccade latency will be used to examine how efficiently attention is directed to individual target colors and saccade errors will be used to determine how often attention is misdirected to critical distractors. Results will provide us with baseline metrics of attentional priority to specific colors and objects and will permit us to more precisely estimate and isolate the effects of memory on the capture of attention in future work.