CASE STUDY: Information-Driven Attentional Capture
Visual attention is a fundamental cognitive process that allows individuals to selectively prioritize sensory information in complex environments. While internal goals and external salience are well-known modulators of attention, recent research has uncovered instances of “experience-driven attention,” where task-irrelevant, physically non-salient stimuli reflexively capture attention based on an observer’s unique history. The prototypical example of this phenomenon is value-driven attentional capture (VDAC), which relies on a history of reward associations. However, a significant gap in the understanding of experience-driven attention exists when monetary reward is absent. In such cases, the mechanism driving attentional capture—particularly when linked to a history of target-seeking—remains unclear.
The research paper “Information-driven attentional capture” by Doyle et al. (2025) directly addresses this gap. The core research question revolves around whether attentional capture, in the absence of monetary reward, is driven by a history of target-seeking per se, or by an association with instrumental information. This distinction is crucial for developing a more complete mechanistic account of experience-driven attention. The authors hypothesize that instrumental information, rather than just target-seeking, is the driving force behind this form of attentional capture.
Attentional Capture, Color, and Eye Tracking Study
Given that eye movements directly reflect information sampling, the researchers operationalized attentional prioritization as a saccade (a rapid eye movement) to the location of an information-associated distractor. This approach provided a highly sensitive metric for assessing attentional capture.
In the training phase, participants were exposed to pre-cues that rendered target-color information either instrumental (necessary for task completion) or redundant (already provided by the pre-cue). Crucially, monetary reward was entirely removed, ensuring that any observed attentional differences were solely due to information history and not confounded by value-driven attention. In the subsequent test phase, participants searched for a shape-defined target, and distractors, rendered in colors previously associated with either instrumental or redundant information.
Eye Movements Show Distractors Capture Attention
The eye-tracking data revealed that distractors associated with instrumental information were more likely to draw eye movements (saccades) than were distractors associated with redundant information. The study also found that, while reaction times (RTs) did not show a direct main effect of information history on attentional capture (unlike in previous reward-based studies), individual differences in RT were correlated with individual differences in oculomotor capture. This suggests that the impact of information history on RT manifested as an interaction with eye movements to the distractors.
This research underscores the indispensable nature of eye tracking in dissecting the subtle and often subconscious processes of attentional capture, particularly when dissociating between different underlying mechanisms like value-driven versus information-driven attention. The study demonstrates that oculomotor data can provide a sensitive and direct measure of attentional prioritization in such complex cognitive paradigms.
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