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Statistical regularities cause attentional suppression with target-matching distractors

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...

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Autores principales: Kerzel, Dirk, Huynh Cong, Stanislas
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer US 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7875956/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33251562
http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13414-020-02206-9
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author Kerzel, Dirk
Huynh Cong, Stanislas
author_facet Kerzel, Dirk
Huynh Cong, Stanislas
author_sort Kerzel, Dirk
collection PubMed
description 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.
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spelling pubmed-78759562021-02-22 Statistical regularities cause attentional suppression with target-matching distractors Kerzel, Dirk Huynh Cong, Stanislas Atten Percept Psychophys Article 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. Springer US 2020-11-29 2021 /pmc/articles/PMC7875956/ /pubmed/33251562 http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13414-020-02206-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Kerzel, Dirk
Huynh Cong, Stanislas
Statistical regularities cause attentional suppression with target-matching distractors
title Statistical regularities cause attentional suppression with target-matching distractors
title_full Statistical regularities cause attentional suppression with target-matching distractors
title_fullStr Statistical regularities cause attentional suppression with target-matching distractors
title_full_unstemmed Statistical regularities cause attentional suppression with target-matching distractors
title_short Statistical regularities cause attentional suppression with target-matching distractors
title_sort statistical regularities cause attentional suppression with target-matching distractors
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7875956/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33251562
http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13414-020-02206-9
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