Is attention really biased toward the last target location in visual search? Attention, response rules, distractors, and eye movements.

The visual search and target-target cueing literatures have reached opposite conclusions about whether a shift of attention is biased toward or away from, respectively, previously attended target locations. In this article, we aimed to figure out why. The main differences between the two experimental approaches concern (1) the stimulus-response translation rules ("what" identification keypresses vs.

The illusion of control: Sequential dependencies underlie contingent attentional capture.

The degree to which humans have top-down control over which information they process remains a central debate within the attention literature. Most of the evidence supporting the top-down control of visuospatial attention has come from cueing paradigms in which target stimuli are preceded by cues that are similar or dissimilar from the target. These studies find that the cues similar to targets capture attention, but dissimilar cues do not, suggesting the top-down control of attention.