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Reaching trajectories curve toward salient distractors, reflecting the competing activation of reach plans toward target and distractor stimuli. We investigated whether the relative saliency of target and distractor influenced the curvature of the movement and the selection of the final endpoint of the reach. Participants were asked to reach a bar tilted to the right in a context of gray vertical bars. A bar tilted to the left served as distractor. Relative stimulus saliency was varied via color: either the distractor was red and the target was gray, or vice versa. Throughout, we observed that reach trajectories deviated toward the distractor. Surprisingly, relative saliency had no effect on the curvature of reach trajectories. Moreover, when we increased time pressure in separate experiments and analyzed the curvature as a function of reaction time, no influence of relative stimulus saliency was found, not even for the fastest reaction times. If anything, curvature decreased with strong time pressure. In contrast, reach target selection under strong time pressure was influenced by relative saliency: reaches with short reaction times were likely to go to the red distractor. The time course of reach target selection was comparable to saccadic target selection. Implications for the neural basis of trajectory deviations and target selection in manual and eye movements are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contingent attentional capture hypothesis proposes that visual stimuli that do not possess characteristics relevant for the current task will not capture attention, irrespective of their bottom-up saliency. Typically, contingent capture is tested in a spatial cuing paradigm, comparing manual reaction times (RTs) across different conditions. However, attention may act through several mechanisms and RTs may not be ideal to disentangle those different components. In 3 experiments, we examined whether color singleton cues provoke cuing effects in temporal order judgments (TOJs) and whether they would be contingent on attentional control sets. Experiment 1 showed that color singleton cues indeed produce cuing effects in TOJs, even in a cluttered and dynamic target display containing multiple heterogeneous distractors. In Experiment 2, consistent with contingent capture, we observed reliable cuing effects only when the singleton cue matched participants' current attentional control set. Experiment 3 suggests that a sensory interaction account of the differences found in Experiment 2 is unlikely. Our results help to discern the attentional components that may play a role in contingent capture. Further, we discuss a number of other effects (e.g., reversed cuing effects) that are found in RTs, but so far have not been reported in TOJs. Those differences suggest that RTs are influenced by a multitude of mechanisms; however, not all of these mechanisms may affect TOJs. We conclude by highlighting how the study of attentional capture in TOJs provides valuable insights for the attention literature, but also for studies concerned with the perceived timing between stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]