A saliency-specific and dimension-independent mechanism of distractor suppression
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A saliency-specific and dimension-independent mechanism of distractor suppression Dongyu Gong 1,2
&
Jan Theeuwes 2
Accepted: 7 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract During everyday tasks, salient distractors may capture our attention. Recently, it was shown that through implicit learning, capture by a salient distractor is reduced by suppressing the location where a distractor is likely to appear. In the current study, we presented distractors of different saliency levels at the same specific location, asking the question whether there is always one suppression level for a particular location or whether, for one location, suppression depends on the actual saliency of the distractor appearing at that location. In three experiments, we demonstrate a saliency-specific mechanism of distractor suppression, which can be flexibly modulated by the overall probability of encountering distractors of different saliency levels to optimize behavior in a specific environment. The results also suggest that this mechanism has dimension-independent aspects, given that the saliency-specific suppression pattern is unaffected when saliency signals of distractors are generated by different dimensions. It is argued that suppression is saliencydependent, implying that suppression is modulated on a trial-by-trial basis contingent on the saliency of the actual distractor presented. Keywords Suppression . Saliency . Attentional capture . Visual attention
Public significance statement
Introduction
It is important to be able to avoid distraction from salient objects. Previous studies have shown that we can extract spatial and feature regularities from the visual environment, which in turn leads to optimized attentional control. In the current study, we show that suppression at a particular location can be selectively adjusted to the saliency level of the distractor presented at that location. In other words, the amount of suppression at a particular location is contingent on the saliency of the distractor appearing at that location. It is argued in favor of saliency-dependent suppression that modulates suppression on a trial-by-trial basis, contingent on the saliency of the actual distractor presented.
In everyday life, at any moment in time, our visual system receives massive amounts of information (K. Koch et al., 2006). Due to the limited amount of cognitive resources available (Broadbent, 1958; Lennie, 2003), we must select information that is relevant to us while ignoring irrelevant stimuli that may distract us. It is generally agreed that attentional deployment can be biased by both physical saliency of the object (i.e., bottom-up, stimulus-driven selection) and current goals in the task (i.e., top-down, goal-oriented selection; Corbetta & Shulman, 2002; Theeuwes, 2010). Under this framework, many models of attentional control have proposed that the early features of the visual scene will be computed hierarchically to generate conspicuity maps for different feature dimensions, and then the conspicuity maps are combined in
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