John Jonides’s research while affiliated with University of Michigan and other places

The study of attentional allocation due to external stimulation has a long history in psychology. Early research by Yantis and Jonides suggested that abrupt onsets constitute a unique class of stimuli that captures attention in a stimulus-driven fashion unless attention is proactively directed elsewhere. Since then, the study of visual attention has evolved significantly. This article revisits the core conclusions by Yantis and Jonides in light of subsequent findings and highlights emerging issues for future investigation. These issues include clarifying key concepts of visual attention, adopting measures with greater spatiotemporal precision, exploring how past experiences modulate the effects of abrupt onsets, and understanding individual differences in attentional allocation. Addressing these issues is challenging but crucial, and we offer some perspectives on how one might choose to study these issues going forward. Finally, we call for more investigation into abrupt onsets. Perhaps due to their strong potential to capture attention, abrupt onsets are often set aside in pursuit of other conditions that show attenuation of distractor interference. However, given their real-world relevance, abrupt onsets represent the exact type of stimuli that we need to study more to connect laboratory attention research to real life.

Despite long-standing concerns about the use of free reaction times (RTs) in cognitive psychology, they remain a prevalent measure of conflict resolution. This report presents the forced-response method as a fresh approach to examine speed–accuracy trade-off functions (SATs) in conflict tasks. The method involves fixing the overall response time, varying the onset of stimuli, and observing response expression. We applied this method to an arrow flanker task. By systematically varying the time between stimulus onset and response, we reveal a comprehensive time course of the flanker interference effect that is rarely observed in previous literature. We further show that influential manipulations observed in free-RT paradigms similarly affect accuracy within the forced-response technique, suggesting that the forced-response method retains the core cognitive processing characteristics of traditional free-RT conflict tasks. As a behavioral method that examines the time course of cognitive processing, the forced-response method provides a novel and more nuanced look into the dynamics of conflict resolution.

Researchers have long debated how humans select relevant objects amid physically salient distractions. An increasingly popular view holds that the key to avoiding distractions lies in suppressing the attentional priority of a salient distractor. However, the precise mechanisms of distractor suppression remain elusive. Because the computation of attentional priority is a time-dependent process, distractor suppression must be understood within these temporal dynamics. In four experiments, we tracked the temporal dynamics of visual attention using a novel forced-response method, by which participants were required to express their latent attentional priority at varying processing times via saccades. We show that attention could be biased either toward or away from a salient distractor depending on the timing of observation, with these temporal dynamics varying substantially across experiments. These dynamics were explained by a computational model assuming the distractor and target priority signals arrive asynchronously in time and with different influences on saccadic behavior. The model suggests that distractor signal suppression can be achieved via a “slow” mechanism in which the distractor priority signal dictates saccadic behavior until a late-arriving priority signal overrides it, or a “fast” mechanism which directly suppresses the distractor priority signal’s behavioral expression. The two mechanisms are temporally dissociable and can work collaboratively, resulting in time-dependent patterns of attentional allocation. The current work underscores the importance of considering the temporal dynamics of visual attention and provides a computational architecture for understanding the mechanisms of distractor suppression.

Abrupt onsets are commonly assumed to be a class of stimuli with high physical salience. Presumably because of this, abrupt onsets tend to capture attention even when other types of distractors, such as color singletons, do not. However, there has been a lack of consensus on the definition and measurement of physical salience. As a result, it is unclear if high physical salience is indeed the reason why abrupt onsets tend to capture attention more strongly than other types of stimuli. Using a psychophysical technique recently developed by Stilwell et al. (2023), we explicitly quantified the level of physical salience of abrupt onsets, color singletons, and color singleton onsets. Surprisingly, abrupt onsets were the least salient among the three types of items. Despite this, only abrupt onsets captured attention in a subsequent visual search task, whereas the other two types of distractors were suppressed. These results indicate that high physical salience is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for abrupt onsets to capture attention.

The study of attentional allocation due to external stimulation has a long history in psychology. Early research by Yantis and Jonides suggested that abrupt onsets constitute a unique class of stimuli that captures attention in a stimulus-driven fashion unless attention is proactively directed elsewhere. Since then, the study of visual attention has evolved significantly. This article revisits the core conclusions by Yantis and Jonides in light of subsequent findings and highlights emerging issues for future investigation. These issues include clarifying key concepts of visual attention, adopting measures with greater spatiotemporal precision, exploring how past experiences modulate the effects of abrupt onsets, and understanding individual differences in attentional allocation. Addressing these issues is challenging but crucial, and we offer some perspectives on how one might choose to study these issues going forward. Finally, we call for more investigation into abrupt onsets. Perhaps due to their strong potential to capture attention, abrupt onsets are often set aside in pursuit of other conditions that show attenuation of distractor interference. However, given their real-world relevance, abrupt onsets represent the exact type of stimuli that we need to study more to connect laboratory attention research to real life.

Researchers have long debated how humans select relevant objects amid physically salient distractions. An increasingly popular view holds that the key to avoiding distractions lies in suppressing the attentional priority of a salient distractor. However, the precise mechanisms of distractor suppression remain elusive. Because the computation of attentional priority is a time-dependent process, distractor suppression must be understood within these temporal dynamics. In four experiments, we tracked the temporal dynamics of visual attention using a novel forced-response method, by which participants were required to express their latent attentional priority at varying processing times via saccades. We show that attention could either be biased toward or away from a salient distractor depending on the timing of observation, with these temporal dynamics varying substantially across experiments. These dynamics were explained by a computational model assuming the distractor and target priority signals arrive asynchronously in time and with different influences on saccadic behavior. The model suggests that distractor signal suppression can be achieved via a “slow” mechanism in which the distractor priority signal dictates saccadic behavior until a late-arriving priority signal overrides it, or a “fast” mechanism which directly suppresses the distractor priority signal’s behavioral expression. The two mechanisms are temporally dissociable and can work collaboratively, resulting in time-dependent patterns of attentional allocation. The current work underscores the importance of considering the temporal dynamics of visual attention and provides a computational architecture for understanding the mechanisms of distractor suppression.