Statistical regularities cause attentional suppression with target-matching distractors

Abstract

Visual search may be disrupted by the presentation of salient, but irrelevant stimuli. To reduce the impact of salient distractors, attention may suppress their processing below baseline level. While there are many studies on the attentional suppression of distractors with features distinct from the target (e.g., a color distractor with a shape target), there is little and inconsistent evidence for attentional suppression with distractors sharing the target feature. In this study, distractor and target were temporally separated in a cue–target paradigm, where the cue was shown briefly before the target display. With target-matching cues, RTs were shorter when the cue appeared at the target location (valid cues) compared with when it appeared at a nontarget location (invalid cues). To induce attentional suppression, we presented the cue more frequently at one out of four possible target positions. We found that invalid cues appearing at the high-frequency cue position produced less interference than invalid cues appearing at a low-frequency cue position. Crucially, target processing was also impaired at the high-frequency cue position, providing strong evidence for attentional suppression of the cued location. Overall, attentional suppression of the frequent distractor location could be established through feature-based attention, suggesting that feature-based attention may guide attentional suppression just as it guides attentional enhancement.

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

“…Second, on distractor-absent trials, reaction times (RTs) increased when the target was shown on the high-probability distractor position compared with when it was shown on a low-probability distractor position. The reduced distractor interference on the high-frequency distractor position was attributed to the shielding of visual search from likely distractor positions (e.g., Goschy et al, 2014 ; Sauter et al, 2018 ) or altered distractor filtering (e.g., Ferrante et al, 2018 ), but by far the most frequent interpretation was that it resulted from attentional suppression (Di Caro & Della Libera, 2021 ; Di Caro et al, 2019 ; Kerzel & Huynh Cong, 2021 ; Liesefeld & Müller, 2021 ; Sauter et al, 2021 ; Sauter et al, 2019 ; van Moorselaar et al, 2020 ; van Moorselaar & Slagter, 2019 ; van Moorselaar & Theeuwes, 2021a , 2021b ; Wang & Theeuwes, 2018a , 2018b , 2018c ). Attentional suppression of the high-frequency distractor position was assumed to be learned through the repeated presentation of the distractor on the same position and served to reduce distractor interference.…”

Swift attenuation of irrelevant features through feature consistency: Evidence from a capture-probe version of the contingent-capture protocol

“…Importantly, however, these studies used shape targets and colour singletons as salient distractors. It is possible that the dimensional overlap in our study (i.e., colour targets and colour distractors/cues) made it difficult for participants to apply second-order suppression to a dimension that was also relevant to the task (e.g., Pomper et al, 2023 ; Weichselbaum & Ansorge, 2018 ; but see Kerzel & Huynh Cong, 2020 ). Maintaining search templates for features from different dimensions is known to weaken top-down guidance ( Biderman et al, 2017 ).…”