Abstract
Although people can pay attention to targets while ignoring distractors, previous research suggests that target enhancement and distractor suppression work separately and independently. Here, we sought to replicate previous findings and re-establish their independence. We employed an internet-based psychological experiment. We presented participants with a visual search task in which they searched for a specified shape with or without a singleton. We replicated the singleton-presence benefit in search performance, but this effect was limited to cases where the target color was fixed across all trials. In a randomly intermixed probe task (30% of all trials), the participants searched for a letter among colored probes; we used this task to assess how far attention was separately allocated toward the target or distractor dimensions. We found a negative correlation between target enhancement and distractor suppression, indicating that the participants who paid closer attention to target features ignored distractor features less effectively and vice versa. Averaged data showed no benefit from target color or cost from distractor color, possibly because of the substantial differences in strategy across participants. These results suggest that target enhancement and distractor suppression guide attention in mutually dependent ways and that the relative contribution of these components depends on the participants' search strategy.
Highlights
Owing to limitations in attentional capacity, we must attend selectively to goal-related items and ignore ones that are unrelated to our goals
The participants in their study performed a visual search after providing a distractor color as a negative cue; target detection was found to be faster than in neutral trials, and the authors argued that observers can use their prior knowledge of distractor features to guide visual attention
In Experiment 1, where target and distractor colors were fixed during the trials, the reaction time (RT) were faster for singleton-present trials than in singleton-absent trials (À5.8 ms [95% CI, À0.23 to À11.3]; t (45) = 2.10, p = .041, d = 0.31)
Summary
Owing to limitations in attentional capacity, we must attend selectively to goal-related items and ignore ones that are unrelated to our goals. The participants in their study performed a visual search after providing a distractor color as a negative cue; target detection was found to be faster than in neutral trials, and the authors argued that observers can use their prior knowledge of distractor features to guide visual attention This distractor suppression has been reportedly achieved through extensive practice or learning (Cunningham & Egeth, 2016; Zehetleitner, Goschy, & Müller, 2012; Geng, Won, & Carlisle, 2019). Cunningham and Egeth (2016) asked participants to perform a visual search task with negative or neutral cues (such as the words “Ignore Red” or “Neutral”) and found that the reaction time (RT) to the target was increased by negative cues in the first block of 72 trials; this difference decreased in subsequent blocks These results suggest that observers can learn to suppress specific to-be-ignored features through considerable practice. We hypothesized that if two attentionalguidance elements, enhancement and suppression, competed for common processing resources, the magnitude of the effect in Experiment 1 would be smaller than those in Experiments 2 and 3 because Experiment 1 required both of these attentional controls
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