Does exogenous attention entail a perceived cognitive cost?

This study investigates the subjective cognitive cost associated with exogenous attention capture by flicker cues. Exogenous attentional capture by flicker has already been demonstrated in the experiment by Stolte and Ansorge (2021). Building on this, the current study aims to explore the subjective cognitive cost of this capture, specifically examining how flicker validity (valid, neutral, invalid) affects participants’ perceived effort and perceived difficulty during a visual search task. Participants complete two blocks (effort and difficulty), each containing 72 trials (24 trials/condition), and after each trial, they report their perceived effort (in the effort block) or perceived difficulty (in the difficulty block). Additionally, exploratory measures of affective and motivational states—frustration, boredom, and engagement—are collected at the end of the experiment to investigate whether differences in subjective cognitive cost between flicker conditions may be partly attributable to these states rather than solely to attentional capture.