Intrusive effects of task-irrelevant information on visual selective attention: semantics and size

Attentional selection is a mechanism by which incoming sensory information is prioritized for further, detailed and more effective, processing. Given that attended information is privileged by the sensory system, understanding and predicting what information is granted prioritization becomes an important endeavor. It has been argued that salient events as well as information that is related to the current goal of the organism (i.e., task-relevant) receive such priority. Here, we propose that attentional prioritization is not limited to task-relevance, and discuss evidence showing that task-irrelevant, non-salient, high-level properties of unattended objects, namely object meaning and size, influence attentional allocation. Such intrusion of non-salient task-irrelevant high-level information points to the need to re-conceptualize and formally modify current models of attentional guidance