No evidence for proactive suppression of explicitly cued distractor features

Abstract

Visual search benefits from advance knowledge of non-target features. However, it is unknown whether these negatively cued features are suppressed in advance (proactively) or during search (reactively). To test this, we presented color cues varying from trial-to-trial that predicted target or non-target colors. Experiment 1 (N=96) showed that both target and nontarget cues speeded search. To test whether attention proactively modified cued feature representations, in Experiment 2 (N=200), we interleaved color probe trials with search and had participants detect the color of a briefly presented ring that could either match the cued color or not. Interestingly, people detected both positively and negatively cued colors better than other colors, indicating that to-be-attended and to-be-ignored features were both proactively enhanced. These results demonstrate that nontarget features are not suppressed proactively, and instead support reactive accounts in which anticipated nontarget features are ignored via strategic enhancement.

Ten simple rules to study distractor suppression

“…EEG and fMRI studies measure preparatory activity, suppressed distractor-evoked sensory activity, or frontoparietal attentional consequences of reactive mechanisms (Adam & Serences, 2021;Marini et al, 2016;Noonan et al, 2016;Won et al, 2020). The vast majority of these methods estimate proactive or reactive processes by behavioral or brain responses to distractors within visual search displays, but some studies examine proactive suppression before the search display using 'probe trials' or direct measurements of preparatory activity (Addleman & Störmer, 2021;Huang et al, 2021;. Given the variety of methods for measuring proactive vs. reactive suppression, it is critical to carefully distinguish between effects we observe and latent mechanisms (Anderson, 2021;Lamy, 2021; see also Rules 4,6,7).…”