Terms of debate: Consensus definitions to guide the scientific discourse on visual distraction

Abstract

Hypothesis-driven research rests on clearly articulated scientific theories. The building blocks for communicating these theories are scientific terms. Obviously, communication – and thus, scientific progress – is hampered if the meaning of these terms varies idiosyncratically across (sub)fields and even across individual researchers within the same subfield. We have formed an international group of experts representing various theoretical stances with the goal to homogenize the use of the terms that are most relevant to the field of visual distraction in visual search. Our discussions revealed striking heterogeneity and we had to invest much time and effort to increase our mutual understanding of each other’s use of central terms, which turned out to be strongly related to our respective theoretical positions. We present the outcomes of these discussions in a glossary and provide some context in several essays. Specifically, we explicate how central terms are used in the distraction literature and consensually sharpen their definitions in order to enable communication across theoretical standpoints. Where applicable, we also explain how the respective constructs can be measured. We believe that this novel type of adversarial collaboration can serve as a model for other fields of psychological research that strive to build a solid groundwork for theorizing and communicating by establishing a common language. For the field of visual distraction, the present paper should facilitate communication across theoretical standpoints and may serve as an introduction and reference text for newcomers.

The surprising robustness of visual search against concurrent auditory distraction.

“…The visual-attention literature typically differentiates two classes of distractor interference: attentional capture and (nonspatial) filtering costs. “Attentional capture” refers to the phenomenon that focused attention is initially drawn to the distractor and can only afterward move on to the search target (Liesefeld & Müller, 2019; Liesefeld et al, 2023; Theeuwes, 2010; see below for other uses of the term “attentional capture” in the auditory-distraction literature). There is an ongoing debate on whether behavioral distractor-interference effects in visual search must necessarily reflect attentional capture, or alternatively, can (also) be interpreted as delayed attention allocation to the target for other reasons (“nonspatial filtering costs”; Becker, 2007; Liesefeld et al, 2019).…”

“…The core idea of Guided Search is that search is, well, guided by a spatial mental representation coding for the potential relevance of stimuli. This representation is most commonly referred to as a priority map (Awh et al, 2012; Bisley & Mirpour, 2019; Fecteau & Munoz, 2006; Liesefeld et al, 2023; Luck et al, 2021). Guidance means that spatial attention does not visit each individual stimulus, but only those that are represented by a high activation on the priority map.…”

“…Much like “attention” itself (see Chun et al, 2011), the term “salience” has many different meanings in everyday language and in various research communities. The conception of salience we adopt here (in line with the visual-search community; Liesefeld et al, 2023) is that of local feature contrast (Liesefeld et al, 2016; Nothdurft, 1993): a stimulus is salient if one or more of certain of its features differs sufficiently from the respective feature(s) of the stimuli surrounding it (for a comprehensive list of relevant features for the visual domain, see Wolfe & Horowitz, 2017). Therefore, a red tomato among green tomatoes is salient and easily found whereas the same red tomato among other red tomatoes is not.…”

“…Otherwise, observers will engage in a piecemeal processing of the search display that is not guided by priority (clump scanning; Liesefeld & Müller, 2023; Liesefeld et al, 2021). Similarly, Bacon and Egeth (1994; see also Leber & Egeth, 2006) have proposed that only when the target is salient (they usually refer to it being a singleton, but see Liesefeld et al, 2023, for a differentiation of salience and singleton status) do observers look for salience signals (in the common community lingo: they have an attentional set for salience or they employ singleton-detection mode). Otherwise, observers look for specific target features (feature-search mode) and therefore a distractor with different features—even if highly salient—will not interfere.…”

Increased display complexity reveals effects of salience in action control.

“…Usually, salience is investigated in visual search . There, stimulus salience is typically defined as the local feature difference between a stimulus in contrast to its surroundings on one or several feature dimensions (Itti & Koch, 2000; Liesefeld et al, 2018, 2023; Nothdurft, 2000; Theeuwes, 2010). For example, we perceive a red stimulus among green stimuli as salient because its color strongly differs from the surrounding stimuli.…”