Preparatory Control Against Distraction Is Not Feature-Based

Abstract

Salient-but-irrelevant stimuli (distractors) co-occurring with search targets can capture attention against the observer’s will. Recently, evidence has accumulated that preparatory control can prevent this misguidance of spatial attention in predictable situations. However, the underlying mechanisms have remained elusive. Most pertinent theories assume that attention is guided by specific features. This widespread theoretical claim provides several strong predictions with regard to distractor handling that are disconfirmed here: Employing electrophysiological markers of covert attentional dynamics, in three experiments, we show that distractors standing out by a feature that is categorically different from the target consistently captures attention. However, equally salient distractors standing out in a different feature dimension are effectively down-weighted, even if unpredictably swapping their defining feature with the target. This shows that preparing for a distractor’s feature is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful avoidance of attentional capture. Rather, capture is prevented by preparing for the distractor’s feature dimension.

The Surprising Robustness of Visual Search Against Concurrent Auditory Distraction

“…Now that we have developed a laboratory task that can in principle induce auditory distraction of concurrent visual attentional processing (Exp. 6), future research can start examining how more selective distractor handling is possible, e.g., by adapting to the statistical regularity that distraction often comes from the back of the car (Ferrante et al, 2018;Goschy et al, 2014;Sauter et al, 2018;Wang & Theeuwes, 2018) or to the specific relationship between the counting sound and the auditory distractor (e.g., in terms of similarity, feature dimension, or relative salience; see Gaspar & McDonald, 2014;Liesefeld et al, , 2021van Zoest & Donk, 2004).…”

“…Potentially, our task design is not suited to measure the consequences of interference, or our analyses are not sensitive enough to detect it (Chan & Hayward, 2009;Zehetleitner et al, 2009). To exclude these possibilities, we replaced the auditory distractor with a commonly used visual distractor: a salient red stimulus (Jannati et al, 2013;Liesefeld et al, 2021;Theeuwes, 1991Theeuwes, , 1992.…”

An EEG study of the combined effects of top‐down and bottom‐up attentional selection under varying task difficulty

“…Because on some trials the target could be the color singleton, a strategy for suppressing all color singletons would not be beneficial (see Kerzel & Burra, 2020). Similarly, as the cardinal color of the search-display changed randomly, no feature-based rejection-template could be adopted (but see Liesefeld et al, 2021). Recently, it was proposed that the inhibition of a salient color singleton is a result of selection history rather than top-down knowledge of the distractor features and may be possible through practice (Gaspelin & Luck, 2019).…”

“…The time window in which the P D can arise is wide, sometimes following the N2pc and sometimes occurring during, or before it, indicating different stages of distractor inhibition (Berggren & Eimer, 2020). A recent study by Liesefeld et al (2017; see also Feldmann‐Wüstefeld et al, 2021, and Liesefeld et al, 2021) tracked the temporal dynamics of attentional shifts during visual search in the presence of a salient distractor as reflected by the N2pc and P D . That study provided a direct comparison of target and distractor N2pc and P D by comparing conditions in which the target was presented laterally while the salient distractor was presented on the midline or vice versa, thereby, measuring lateral activity for each of them individually (see Hickey et al, 2006).…”

Effects of salience are long-lived and stubborn

“…It is assumed that salience drives overt and covert allocations of attention in the absence or in the service of a specific task (Itti & Koch, 2001). When stimuli share the same task relevance, salience determines the order of attention allocation (Christie et al, 2018;Woodman & Luck, 1999) and, under certain conditions, salience can even overrule task relevance (Liesefeld et al, 2022;Liesefeld et al, 2017).…”