Statistical regularities cause attentional suppression with target-matching distractors
- PDF / 975,189 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 27 Downloads / 180 Views
Statistical regularities cause attentional suppression with target-matching distractors Dirk Kerzel 1 & Stanislas Huynh Cong 1 Accepted: 10 November 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract 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. Keywords Visual search . Attentional capture . Statistical learning . Attentional suppression
The visual system is confronted with more sensory information than it can process. Selective attention is thought to reduce the amount of visual information by filtering out sensory signals that are irrelevant for the task at hand (Bundesen, Habekost, & Kyllingsbaek, 2005; Desimone & Duncan, 1995; Schneider, 2013; Tsotsos, Kotseruba, Rasouli, & Solbach, 2018). To locate relevant information, the incoming sensory information is matched to a stored representation of the target features, which is referred to as attentional template (Duncan & Humphreys, 1989), target template (Vickery, King, & Jiang, 2005), or attentional control set (Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992). Attentional templates may contribute to several stages of visual search. Initially, attentional templates may enhance the target features in a spatially global manner by activating feature-based attention (Andersen, Hillyard, & Muller, 2013; Maunsell & Treue, 2006; W. Zhang & Luck, 2009). Then, feature-based attention * Dirk Kerzel [email protected] 1
Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l’Education, Université de Genève, 40 Boulevard du Pont d’Arve, 1205 Genève, Switzerland
is thought to guide location-based attention to the target location (Eimer, 2014; Wolfe, 2007), where it enhances stimulus processing. For instance, percept
Data Loading...
