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Abstract
Previous investigations of the ability to maintain separate attentional control settings for different spatial lo- cations have relied principally on a go/no-go spatial-cueing paradigm. The results have suggested that control of atten- tion is accomplished only late in processing. However, the go/no-go task does not provide strong incentives to with- hold attention from irrelevant color-location conjunctions. We used a modified version of the task in which failing to adopt multiple control settings would be detrimental to performance. Two RSVP streams of colored letters appeared to the left and right of fixation. Participants searched for targets that were a conjunction of color and location, so that the target color for one stream acted as a distractor when presented in the opposite stream. Distractors that did not match the target conjunctions nevertheless captured atten- tion and interfered with performance. This was the case even when the target conjunctions were previewed early in the trial prior to the target (Exp. 2). However, distractor interference was reduced when the upcoming distractor was previewed early on in the trial (Exp. 3). Attentional selection of targets by color-location conjunctions may be effective if facilitative attentional sets are accompanied by the top-down inhibition of irrelevant items. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]