Figure 1.

Classic paradigms used to study capture of attention by singletons. (a) The spatial cuing paradigm supported the contingent involuntary orienting hypothesis by demonstrating that only cues matching the target feature captured attention (Folk et al., 1992) (b) The additional singleton paradigm was initially used to support stimulus-driven accounts by demonstrating that an irrelevant singleton seemed to capture attention (Theeuwes, 1992). This finding was later challenged by a variant that used heterogenous displays to prevent singleton detection mode (Bacon & Egeth, 1994), but the interpretation of this new variant has also been challenged (Belopolsky et al., 2010; Theeuwes, 2004; Wang & Theeuwes, 2020).