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Annual Review of Psychology

Volume 76, 2025

Attentional Capture and Control

  • Jan Theeuwes1,2
  • 1Institute Brain and Behaviour Amsterdam (iBBA), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; email: [email protected] 2William James Center for Research, ISPA-Instituto Universitario, Lisbon, Portugal
  • Vol. 76:251-273 (Volume publication date January 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on October 14, 2024
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

The current review presents an integrated tripartite framework for understanding attentional control, emphasizing the interaction and competition among top-down, bottom-up, and selection-history influences. It focuses on attentional capture, which refers to conditions in which salient objects or events receive attentional priority even when they are inconsistent with the goals, tasks, and intentions of the observer. The review describes which components of the tripartite framework are in play when distraction by salient objects is prevented and the conditions in which there is no control over the occurrence of attentional capture. It then concludes that attentional capture can be controlled in a proactive way mainly by implicit statistical learning mechanisms associated with selection history. Current and lingering controversies regarding the control of attentional capture are also discussed.

Keyword(s): attention, attentional capture, bottom-up control, cognition, top-down control, visual search
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2025-01-17
2025-06-18
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Attentional Capture and Control
Annual Review of Psychology 76, 251 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-011624-025340
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-011624-025340
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-011624-025340
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