The time course of the contingent spatial blink

Attentional capture is the unintentional deployment of attention to a task-irrelevant but attentionally salient object. The contingent involuntary orienting hypothesis states that it occurs only if a distractor's property matches current top-down attentional control settings (Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992). Folk, Leber, and Egeth (2002) found that monitoring a central RSVP stream for a coloured target led to spatial attentional capture by a peripheral distractor that matched the target colour. Using a similar paradigm, we explored the time course of this spatial blink. Implications of this study for current accounts of the attentional capture phenomenon are discussed.