**Abstract**
In the present study, we jointly addressed – for the first time – two main theories concerning attentional capture (Lavie’s perceptual load theory and Gaspelin and colleagues’ attentional dwelling hypothesis), which systematically present opposite interference outcomes by distractors as a function of perceptual load/task difficulty, with similar manipulations. We hypothesized that these opposite results may critically depend on the distractor type used by the two experimental procedures (i.e., distractors inside vs. outside the attentional focus, which could be considered as potentially relevant vs. irrelevant, respectively, to the main task). Across a series of four experiments, we compared both theories within the same paradigm by manipulating both the perceptual load/task difficulty and the distractor type. Results were strongly consistent, suggesting that the influence of task demands on attentional capture varies as a function of distractor type: while the interference from (relevant) distractors presented inside the attentional focus was consistently higher for high vs. low load conditions, there was no modulation by (irrelevant) distractors presented outside the attentional focus. Moreover, we critically analyzed the conceptualization of interference by both theories, disentangling important outcomes for the dwelling hypothesis. Our results provide specific insight into new aspects in attentional capture, which could critically redefine these two predominant theories.
