It's alive! animate motion captures visual attention.

Across humans' evolutionary history, detecting animate entities in the visual field (such as prey and predators) has been critical for survival. One of the defining features of animals is their motion-self-propelled and self-directed. Does such animate motion capture visual attention? To answer this question, we compared the time to detect targets involving objects that were moving predictably as a result of collisions (inanimate motion) with the time to detect targets involving objects that were moving unpredictably, having been in no such collisions (animate motion).

Visuospatial attention is guided by both the symbolic value and the spatial proximity of selected arrows.

There is considerable evidence that overlearned symbols, especially arrows, can orient attention to peripheral locations. In 2003, Pratt and Hommel showed that when 1 arrow is selected from a set of arrows, based on an attentional control setting for a specific target color, the selected arrow determines the orientation of attention. Recently, Leblanc and Jolicoeur (2010) reexamined this finding, and concluded that spatial proximity of the arrow to the target, not the symbolic value of the arrow, determines the orienting of attention.

Isoluminant motion onset captures attention.

In their 2003 article, Abrams and Christ found that the onset of motion captured attention more effectively than either the offset of motion or continuous motion. Abrams and Christ conceptualized the capture to be occurring at a level higher than does detection of luminance changes in the stimulus. To examine this claim, in the present experiments we replicated their critical experiment but used isoluminant stimuli, which do not produce the low-level luminance transients typically associated with motion.