Contingent Attentional Engagement: Stimulus- and Goal-Driven Capture Have Qualitatively Different Consequences

We examined whether shifting attention to a location necessarily entails extracting the features at that location, a process referred to as attentional engagement. In three spatial-cuing experiments (N = 60), we found that an onset cue captured attention both when it shared the target’s color and when it did not. Yet the effects of the match between the response associated with the cued object’s identity and the response associated with the target (compatibility effects), which are diagnostic of attentional engagement, were observed only with relevant-color onset cues. These findings demonstrate that stimulus- and goal-driven capture have qualitatively different consequences: Before attention is reoriented to the target, it is engaged to the location of the critical distractor following goal-driven capture but not stimulus-driven capture. The reported dissociation between attentional shifts and attentional engagement suggests that attention is best described as a camera: One can align its zoom lens without pressing the shutter button.