Departments of Psychology, National Taiwan University

We examined whether there exists stimulus-driven attentional capture by onsets, and if so, whether the new-object hypothesis or the salience hypothesis provides a better explanation for the onset capture effect. The Inattentional Blindness (IB) task was adopted to avoid the display-wide attentional setting on onsets. Results showed that the unexpected onset could capture attention in the color task (Experiment 1). The onset capture effect disappeared when the onset was not followed by an offset (Experiment 2), and when two color changes were presented simultaneously (Experiment 3). The dependence of the onset capture effect on the number of changes leads to the conclusion that the onset capture effect observed in the IB task resulted from its salience