On preventing attention capture: Is singleton suppression actually singleton suppression?

Lien, Mei-Ching; Ruthruff, Eric; Hauck, Christopher

doi:10.1007/s00426-021-01599-y

Cited by 33 publications

(70 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…Rather, attention was guided away from the distractor colour via inhibition of the distractor feature value (i.e., the specific colour of the distractor; e.g., Treisman & Sato, 1990; see also Ruthruff et al, 2021), not via reactive inhibition of saliency signals (e.g., Sawaki & Luck, 2010). With this, our results are in line with the results of Lien et al (2021), who showed that suppression effects are equivalent between search arrays containing a single (thus salient) distractor and multiple distractors. Indeed, such results are consistent with findings from an older literature on visual search (e.g., Becker & Horstmann, 2009;Egeth et al, 1984;Kaptein et al, 1995;Treisman & Sato, 1990) in which participants were found to be able to limit selection to a subset of items in a conjunction search task (e.g., selecting only red items in search for a red, tilted item among red vertical and green tilted items).…”

Section: Time Course Of Distractor Benefitssupporting

confidence: 90%

Eye movements reveal the contributions of early and late processes of enhancement and suppression to the guidance of visual search

Hamblin-Frohman

Chang

Egeth

et al. 2022

Atten Percept Psychophys

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In visual search attention can be directed towards items matching top-down goals, but this must compete with factors such as salience that can capture attention. However, under some circumstances it appears that attention can avoid known distractor features. Chang and Egeth (Psychological Science, 30 (12), 1724–1732, 2019) found that such inhibitory effects reflect a combination of distractor-feature suppression and target-feature enhancement. In the present study (N = 48), we extend these findings by revealing that suppression and enhancement effects guide overt attention. On search trials (75% of trials) participants searched for a diamond shape among several other shapes. On half of the search trials all objects were the same colour (e.g., green) and on the other half of the search trials one of the non-target shapes appeared in a different colour (e.g., red). On interleaved probe trials (25% of trials), subjects were presented with four ovals. One of the ovals was in either the colour of the target or the colour of the distractor from the search trials. The other three ovals were on neutral colours. Critically, we found that attention was overtly captured by target colours and avoided distractor colours when they were viewed in a background of neutral colours. In addition, we provided a time course of attentional control. Within visual search tasks we observed inhibition aiding early attentional effects, indexed by the time it took gaze to first reach the target, as well as later decision-making processes indexed by the time for a decision to be made once the target as found.

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Section: Time Course Of Distractor Benefitssupporting

confidence: 90%

Eye movements reveal the contributions of early and late processes of enhancement and suppression to the guidance of visual search

Hamblin-Frohman

Chang

Egeth

et al. 2022

Atten Percept Psychophys

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“…Conversely, attentional suppression is thought to prevent the allocation of attentional resources to distractor stimuli. As a result, the processing of salient distractor stimuli, as evaluated by a secondary probe task, may be worse than the processing of other nontarget stimuli (Gaspelin et al, 2015; but see Lien et al, 2021). In the context of the present study, attentional suppression of the high-frequency distractor position may have prevented the erroneous allocation of attentional resources to distractors appearing at this location.…”

Section: Underlying Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 67%

Statistical learning in visual search reflects distractor rarity, not only attentional suppression

et al. 2022

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In visual search tasks, salient distractors may capture attention involuntarily, but interference can be reduced when the salient distractor appears more frequently on one out of several possible positions. The reduction was attributed to attentional suppression of the high-probability position. However, all previous studies on this topic compared performance on the high-probability position to the remaining positions, which had a low probability of containing the distractor. Therefore, it is not clear whether the difference resulted from reduced interference on the high-probability position or from increased interference on the low-probability positions. To decide between these alternatives, we compared high-probability and low-probability with equal-probability positions. Consistent with attentional suppression, interference was reduced on the high-probability position compared with equal-probability positions. However, there was also an increase in interference on low-probability positions compared with equal-probability positions. The increase is in line with previous reports of boosted interference when distractors are rare. Our results show that the experimental design used in previous research is insufficient to separate effects of attentional suppression and those of distractor rarity.

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“…Because search performance in this variant of the additional singleton paradigm was better in the presence than in the absence of the salient distractor, Gaspelin et al, concluded that the suppression of the salient distractor below baseline accounted for the improved search performance. However, Lien et al (2021) observed that below-baseline performance in the search task occurred even for nonsalient nontargets, which contradicts the idea that the effect arises from suppression of salient distractor stimuli. Further, it was proposed that an electrophysiological component associated with attentional suppression, the P D component (Hickey et al, 2009), occurred in response to a salient distractor that was successfully suppressed (Gaspelin & Luck, 2018).…”

Section: Underlying Mechanismmentioning

confidence: 74%

Guidance of visual search by negative attentional templates depends on task demands.

Kerzel¹,

Cong²

2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Visual search for a target is faster when its features are known before the search display appears, but there is an ongoing discussion about whether knowledge of nontarget features has a similar effect. Stored target or nontarget features used to guide visual search are referred to as positive or negative attentional templates, respectively. We suggest that the inconsistent findings concerning negative attentional templates may arise from 2 methodological choices in past research. The activation of negative attentional templates was never directly assessed and the use of negative attentional templates by the participant was optional. We addressed these issues in the contingent capture paradigm, which provides a marker for the activation of attentional templates in conditions where attentional templates are optional or mandatory. If an attentional template for a color is activated, cuing effects are larger for spatial cues in a matching color than for spatial cues in a nonmatching color. The question is whether the activation of negative attentional templates results in a similar difference between matching and nonmatching colors. We found that negative attentional templates were not activated when the target could be located based on its saliency (singleton search) and the use of the negative attentional template was optional. In contrast, when the negative attentional template was necessary to locate the target (feature search), we found the expected difference between matching and nonmatching spatial cues. Thus, the activation of negative attentional templates depends on task demands. In contrast, positive attentional templates were activated irrespective of task demands.

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On preventing attention capture: Is singleton suppression actually singleton suppression?

Cited by 33 publications

References 52 publications

Eye movements reveal the contributions of early and late processes of enhancement and suppression to the guidance of visual search

Eye movements reveal the contributions of early and late processes of enhancement and suppression to the guidance of visual search

Statistical learning in visual search reflects distractor rarity, not only attentional suppression

Guidance of visual search by negative attentional templates depends on task demands.

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