ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses several basic issues of attention capture and capture failures before turning to a discussion of the most important applications of attention control: the role of automation in directing attention to critical events via alarms and alerts. Effective design in instances requires cues to guide attention in a bottom-up manner toward crucial information. The issue of attentional control can be studied from the perspective of what captures attention. The effects of attention are measured by comparing response times (RT) for target detection following cues of different validity; an attentional cost obtains when RTs for invalid cue trials are longer than for control trials on which no location is cued, and an attention benefit obtains when RTs for valid cue trials are shorter than for control trials. The most direct generalizations from basic research on attention capture to alarm and alert design discussed already is that onsets tend to capture attention.
