The attractiveness of salient distractors to reaching movements is task dependent

Previous studies in visual attention and oculomotor research showed that a physically salient distractor does not always capture attention or the eyes. Under certain top-down task sets, a salient distractor can be actively suppressed, avoiding capture. Even though previous studies showed that reaching movements are also influenced by salient distractors, it is unclear if and how a mechanism of active suppression of distractors would affect reaching movements. Active suppression might also explain why some studies find reaching movements to curve towards a distractor, while others find reaching movements to curve away. In this study, we varied the top-down task set in two separate experiments by manipulating the certainty about the target location. Participants had to reach for a diamond present among three circles. In Experiments 1 and 3, participants had to search for the reach targets; hence, the target’s location certainty was low. In Experiments 2 and 3, the target’s location was cued before the reach; hence, the target’s location certainty was high. We found that reaches curved towards the physically salient, color singleton, distractor in the search-to-reach task (Experiments 1 and 3), but not in the cued reach task (Experiments 2 and 3). Thus, the saliency of the distractor only attracted reaching movements when the certainty of the target’s location was low. Our findings suggest that the attractiveness of physically salient distractors to reaching movements depends on the top-down task set. The results can be explained by the effect of active attentional suppression on the competition between movement plans.