Preemptive control of attentional capture by colour: Evidence from trial-by-trial analyses and orderings of onsets of capture effects in reaction time distributions

According to the preemptive-control hypothesis, participants can specify their control settings to attend to relevant target colours or to ignore the irrelevant distractor colours in advance of the displays. Two predictions of this hypothesis were tested. First, with the control settings being specified in advance, capture by a stimulus that better matches the settings was expected to temporally precede capture by a stimulus that matches the setting less well. Second, with the control settings being specified in advance, stronger capture by the better matching than by the less matching stimulus was predicted not to be a stimulus-driven consequence of the target colour in a preceding trial. Both predictions were shown to hold true under different conditions in three experiments.