Abrupt Visual Onsets and Selective Attention: Voluntary Versus Automatic Allocation

Introspective and empirical evidence both suggest that the abrupt appearance of an object in the visual field "draws attention." A plausible account of this phenomenon is that there exists a mechanism that is tuned to abrupt onsets and that one of its functions is to direct visual attention to the locus of an abrupt onset. This in tum could result in the efficient identification of information at that location. Another way of stating the hypothesis is that abrupt onsets may capture visual attention automatically and cause the observer to process abrupt visual events with high priority.