Attention capture during visual search: The consequences of distractor appeal, familiarity, and frequency

Visual distractions can lure our attention and impede our everyday performance, especially if they are highly meaningful and appealing to the observer. The current research assessed how semantically rich, personally relevant distractors (i.e., cartoon characters), either appealing or neutral, capture attention and whether the frequency with which we encounter these distractors can impact the effects. Participants were slower to identify a target letter in the presence of a neutral distractor relative to an appealing distractor, reflecting covert attentional capture. However, this effect reversed when appealing distractors appeared less frequently than neutral distractors. Collectively, the evidence suggests that the amount of capture observed overall likely depends on the interplay between a distractor’s semantic salience (i.e., the amount of meaningful knowledge an observer has about the distractor), its affective salience (i.e., how the observer feels about the distractor), and how frequently it is encountered.