There is more to contingent capture than feature search

Top-down search goals can guide attention in visual search tasks in the form of so-called contingent capture. Here, we investigated whether contingent capture depends on recently experienced cue utility. To this end, we employed the spatial cueing paradigm of C. L. Folk, R. Remington, and J.C. Johnston (1992), and analysed cueing effects (i.e., differences between longer RTs in invalid than valid conditions) in trial N as a function of cue validity in a preceding trial N-1. Experiment 1 showed that a valid cue in trial N-1 boosted the cuing effect in a subsequent trial N. The cueing effect especially benefitted if cues in trial N-1 matched the search set. In addition, valid cues in N-1 even boosted the cuing effects of irrelevant cues in trial N. Experiment 2 ruled out that our results can be explained by position priming. Experiment 3 extended our findings to tasks
where the search set consisted of two different colours. Our results provide a new perspective on contingent capture.