Abrupt Onsets in Visual Search: Foundations and Emerging Issues

The study of attentional allocation due to external stimulation has a long history in psychology. Since the early work by Yantis and Jonides, there has been a growing and consistent interest in the effect of abrupt visual onsets on such attentional allocation. Yantis and Jonides concluded that abrupt onsets constitute a possibly unique class of stimuli that captures attention in a stimulus-driven fashion, unless attention is proactively directed elsewhere. Since then, the field of visual search has evolved significantly. This article revisits the core conclusions by Yantis and Jonides in light of subsequent evidence and highlights emerging issues for future investigation. We argue that perhaps due to their strong potential to capture attention, abrupt onsets are often set aside as a special case in pursuit of conditions that show attenuation of capture by other types of distractors, such as color singletons. However, given their prevalence in real life, abrupt onsets represent the exact type of stimuli that we need to study more to understand the mechanisms of attentional guidance, including whether abrupt onsets can be suppressed. We also propose using methods that more precisely measure the temporal and spatial dynamics of visual attention beyond making binary judgments about whether attention is captured or not. We provide an example, the forced-response method, that might be suitable for this endeavor.