Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present a computational model of attentional capture inhumans. The model distinguishes between automatic mecha-nisms that directly determine the focus of visual attention, anddeliberate mental actions an individual can perform to influ-ence these mechanisms. The automatic mechanisms select anobject as the focus of attention and enhance its location andfeatures, so that nearby or similar objects are likely to be se-lected in the future. The deliberate actions include engagingwith a selected object to further enhance its features, and re-trieving a previously selected object from memory. By per-forming these actions, the model is able to exert limited top-down control over capture, increasing the probability that task-relevant objects will be attended and irrelevant objects will beignored. To evaluate the model, we conduct a simulation of arecent visual search study, demonstrating that the model canaccount for three established factors that are known to influ-ence capture.