Visual Distraction's Silver Lining: Distractor Suppression Boosts Attention to Competing Stimuli

Article Psychology

Ignoring the Unknown: Attentional Suppression of Unpredictable Visual Distraction

Xiaojin Ma et al.

Summary: Recent findings have shown that people can proactively inhibit salient visual distractors by knowing their color, enhancing efficient search. However, a modification to the search task reveals that people can indeed suppress salient uniquely colored distractors even without prior knowledge of their color. This suppressive mechanism improves visual processing efficiency.

JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-HUMAN PERCEPTION AND PERFORMANCE (2023)

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Article Psychology, Experimental

Does attentional suppression occur at the level of perception or decision-making? Evidence from Gaspelin et al.'s (2015) probe letter task

Dirk Kerzel et al.

Summary: Visual attention can be prevented from being captured by salient stimuli through suppression. Previous studies have shown that processing of letters on distractors is suppressed below baseline, but it is unclear whether this suppression occurs at the perception or decision-making level. New experiments showed that decision-level processes contribute to attentional suppression.

PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH-PSYCHOLOGISCHE FORSCHUNG (2023)

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Article Psychology, Experimental

Individual Differences in Selective Attention Reveal the Nonmonotonicity of Visual Spatial Attention and Its Association With Working Memory Capacity

Sang Ho Lee et al.

Summary: Visual spatial attention is not monotonically distributed across space, but determined by individual differences in selective attention. The distance at which interference is suppressed around the target varies among participants and is negatively correlated with working memory capacity. Results suggest that attentional control modulates the breadth of the attentional distribution, constrained by limited cognitive capacity, to enhance target identification.

JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-GENERAL (2022)

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Article Neurosciences

Biased Competition between Targets and Distractors Reduces Attentional Suppression: Evidence from the Positivity Posterior Contralateral and Distractor Positivity

Dirk Kerzel et al.

Summary: The biased competition account suggests that competition between stimuli increases when they are close together. Previous research has shown that attentional enhancement is reduced when two targets are close. It is unclear whether the processing of distractors is also attenuated when they are close to the target. This study found that attentional suppression of distractors was inhibited when the distance between target and distractor was short.

JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE (2022)

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Review Psychology, Mathematical

Guided Search 6.0: An updated model of visual search

Jeremy M. Wolfe

Summary: This paper introduces the Guided Search 6.0 (GS6) model, which includes five sources of preattentive information such as top-down and bottom-up feature guidance, and three types of functional visual fields (FVFs). GS6 combines asynchronous diffusion and a quitting signal to simulate the basic patterns of response time and error data from a range of search experiments.

PSYCHONOMIC BULLETIN & REVIEW (2021)

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Review Psychology, Multidisciplinary