Four experiments tested a new hypothesis that involuntary attention shifts are contingent on the relationship between the properties of the eliciting event and the properties required for task performance. In a variant of the spatial cuing paradigm, the relation between cue property and the property useful in locating the target was systematically manipulated. In Experiment 1, invalid abrupt-onset precues produced costs for targets characterized by an abrupt onset but not for targets characterized by a discontinuity in color. In Experiment 2, invalid color precues produced greater costs for color targets than for abrupt-onset targets. Experiment 3 provided converging evidence for this pattern. Experiment 4 investigated the boundary conditions and time course for attention shifts elicited by color discontinuities. The results of these experiments suggest that attention capture is contingent on attentional control settings induced by task demands.

Early visual information processing is often characterized as having two functionally distinct modes. One mode is preattentive; information is processed in a spatially parallel manner, without the need for attentional resources. The other mode involves the allocation of attentional resources to specific locations or objects for more complex analysis. Preattentive processes are assumed to perform basic analyses that segment or isolate areas of the visual array, creating functional perceptual units to which attention can then be allocated for more sophisticated, resource-demanding processing (Broadbent, 1958; Egeth, 1977; Hoffman, 1979; Julesz & Bergen, 1983; Neisser, 1967; Treisman & Gelade, 1980; Ullman, 1984).

Research concerning the specific manner in...