Abstract
The identification of a target is impaired by a salient distractor. It has been suggested that this impairment is caused by the temporal or spatial deviation of attentional focus from a task-related location to the distractor. The present study examined whether this impairment, known as attentional capture, differs between sexes. Robust attentional capture was observed in temporal and spatial search tasks. Importantly, attentional capture was more profound for females than males, though only in the temporal search task. No such differences were found in the spatial search task. These results suggest that females are more sensitive than males to bottom-up signals from the distractor. The finding that sex differences in attentional capture were limited to the temporal task implies that different mechanisms are involved in temporal and spatial attentional capture.
