Attentional Capture Between Two Successive Abrupt-onset Objects

In the past two decades, the principle of spatial attentional shift among multipleperceptual items displayed concurrently in different locations has been extensivelyinvestigated. However, the dynamic mechanism of attentional shift amongsuccessively displayed percepts remains unclear. The issue is explored in this study bypresenting two onset objects sequentially within the duration in which only oneattention capture can be executed. The study also conducted to explore the relationbetween temporal order consciousness and attentional selection of successive onsetobjects.The main findings are as follows:(1) When two new objects were successively displayed within the duration in whichonly one attention capture can be executed, attention directs to the latest onsetobject preferentially.(2) The reaction time difference between the second object and the first objectcondition equals to search time of each item, indicating that during visual search,the second object is processed first, and the first object next.(3) Consciousness of the two successive objects' temporal order improved fromunawareness in 10ms SOA to almost exactly aware of the time difference in 70mscondition. That is to say, time resolving threshold of attention control mechanismis lower than consciousness.According to these findings, "Discrete Processing Hypothesis" is proposed to explainattentional selection between two successive abrupt-onset objects.