Contingent attentional capture or delayed allocation of attention?

Under certain circumstances, external stimuli will elicit an involuntary sh ift of spatial attention, referred to as attentional capture. According to the contingent involuntary orienting account (Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992), capture is conditioned by top-down factors that set attention to res pond involuntarily to stimulus properties relevant to one's behavioral goal s. Evidence for this comes from spatial cuing studies showing that a spatia l cuing effect is observed only when cues have goal-relevant properties. He re, we examine alternative, decision-level explanations of the spatial cuin g effect that attribute evidence of capture to postpresentation delays in t he voluntary allocation of attention, rather than to on-line involuntary sh ifts in direct response to the cue. In three spatial cuing experiments, del ayed-allocation accounts were tested by examining whether items at the cued location were preferentially processed. The experiments provide evidence t hat costs and benefits in spatial cuing experiments do reflect the on-line capture of attention. The implications of these results for models of atten tional control are discussed.