An event-related potential study of onset primacy in visual change detection

Onset primacy is a behavioural phenomenon whereby humans identify the appearance of an object (onset) with greater efficiency than other kinds of visual change, such as the disappearance of an object (offset). The default mode hypothesis explains this phenomenon by postulating that the attentional system is optimised for onset detection in its initial state. The present study extended this hypothesis by combining a change-detection task and measurement of the P300 event-related potential, which was thought to index the amount of processing resources available to detecting onsets and offsets. In an experiment, while brain activity was monitored by electroencephalography, participants indicated the locations of onsets and offsets under the condition in which they occurred equally often in the same locations across trials. Although there was no reason to prioritise detecting one type of change over the other, onsets were detected more quickly, and they evoked a larger P300 than offsets. These results suggest that processing resources are preferentially allocated to onset detection. This biased allocation may be a basis on which the attentional system defaults to the ‘onset detection’ mode.