# Studying the Role of Visuospatial Attention in the Multi-Attribute Task Battery II
## 3 Results  
### Analyses of Bottom-Up and Top-Down Capture of Visuospatial Attention in the Visual-Search Task  
For the analysis of top-down and bottom-up attention capture, only trials with correct responses were analyzed. Incorrect responses were excluded. Overall, at least 85% of the responses were correct for each participant, while the mean of correct responses was 95% (see Supplementary Table S4). Two types of scores were calculated: a bottom-up score, which was calculated by subtracting the mean reaction time of all correct responses in the distractor-absent/target-singleton trials, in which no singleton-distractor was presented, from the mean reaction time of all correct responses in the target-dissimilar singleton-distractor trials; and a top-down score, which was calculated by subtracting the mean reaction time of all correct responses in the target-similar singleton-distractor trials. A dependent \(t\)-test of all 49 participants between the bottom-up scores (\(M\) = 13 ms, \(SD\) = 41 ms) and the top-down scores (\(M\) = 56 ms, \(SD\) = 83 ms) showed a significantly lower bottom-up than top-down score, \(t(48)=-2.86\), \(p\) = 0.006, before the MATB-II task. Similar results were shown after the MATB-II task, with a slight numerical decrease in the bottom-up score (\(M\) = 7 ms, \(SD\) = 35 ms) as well as in the top-down score (\(M\) = 37 ms, \(SD\) = 56 ms), \(t(48)=-2.59\), \(p\) = 0.013. However, no significant differences were found between the bottom-up scores before and after the MATB-II, \(t(48)=0.81\), \(p\) = 0.421, or between the top-down scores before and after the MATB-II, \(t(48)=1.87\), \(p\) = 0.077. These results are in line with those achieved in past research [8]. Next, we calculated linear regressions showing the correlations between bottom-up scores at measurement Time Points 1 and 2 and between top-down scores before and after the MATB-II. Bottom-up scores achieved before the MATB-II correlated significantly with bottom-up scores achieved after the MATB-II, \(F(1,\,47)=4.245\), \(p\) = 0.048, \(R^{2}\) = 0.065, adj. \(R^{2}\) = 0.045. The same was true for top-down scores achieved before and after the MATB-II, \(F(1,\,47)=22.75\), \(p\) \(<\) 0.001, \(R^{2}\) = 0.326, adj. \(R^{2}\) = 0.312. [PERSON]'s Rho correlations were, thus, in the same ballpark as in previous studies, with bottom-up scores before and after the MATB-II, \(r_{s}\) = 0.28, \(p\) = 0.046; and with top-down scores before and after the MATB-II, \(r_{s}\) = 0.57, \(p\) \(<\) 0.001. See Figure 5.  
When correlating the bottom-up scores to the top-down scores before the MATB-II, a significant but negative correlation was found, \(F(1,\,47)=7.080\), \(p\) = 0.011, \(R^{2}\) = 0.131, adj. \(R^{2}\) = 0.112. Again, the same is true when correlating bottom-up scores and top-down scores after the MATB-II, \(F(1,\,47)=22.130\), \(p\) \(<\) 0.001, \(R^{2}\) = 0.320, adj. \(R^{2}\) = 0.306. [PERSON]'s Rho correlations between the bottom-up scores and the top-down scores before and after the MATB-II were as followed: \(r_{s}\) = \(-\)0.45, \(p\) = 0.001 before the MATB-II; and \(r_{s}\) = \(-\)0.54, \(p\) \(<\) 0.001 after the MATB-II. See Figure 6.  
Lastly, we compared the number of times participants' gaze was distracted by the singleton distractor with the number of times participants were distracted by the nonsingletons (the gray discs). This was done to check if the distractors indeed captured attention or if longer response times (RTs) in trials with a singleton distractor reflected a nonspatial filtering cost [11]. Looking at all distractor-present trials, those with a nonmatching (target-dissimilar) singleton distractor as well as those with a matching (target-similar) singleton distractor present, we observed that participants' eyes fixated the singleton distractors more often (\(M\) = 22.06, \(SD\) = 13.77) than the gray nonsingletons (\(M\) = 9.16, \(SD\) = 8.16), \(t(215)=11.81\), \(p\) \(<\) 0.001.