Experience-dependent attentional tuning of distractor rejection

Abstract

Irrelevant salient distractors often capture attention, but given a sufficiently specific search template, these salient items no longer capture attention. In the present experiments, we investigated whether specific target templates are sufficient to resist capture, or whether experience with the salient distractors is also necessary. To test this hypothesis, observers completed four blocks of trials, each with a different-colored irrelevant singleton present on half of the trials. Color singletons captured attention early within a block, but after sufficient experience with the irrelevant singletons, those singletons no longer captured attention in the second halves of the blocks. This result suggests that to resist capture, a specific target template must be accompanied by experience-dependent attentional tuning to distractor properties.Keywords Attentional capture . Cognitive control . Attentional control . LearningThe world is filled with distractions, ranging from the abrupt appearance of an Internet pop-up ad to the sound of a coffee grinder at the local bistro. A primary purpose of attention is to restrict processing to items relevant to our current behavior and to minimize interference from irrelevant distractors. An important issue in the attentional-control literature has centered on the mechanisms of this restriction, with two rival hypotheses emerging to explain when attention is captured by distracting information. One account proposes that attention is stimulus-driven and that salient distractors capture attention irrespective of one's goals or attentional set (Theeuwes, 1992(Theeuwes, , 2010. Another account proposes that attention is driven by one's goals and that attentional capture is contingent on one's attentional set; only distractors matching a current attentional set will capture attention (e.g., Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992). Against this backdrop, much of the past 20 years of research has focused on distinguishing stimulus-driven capture from contingent capture, with a focus on which of these two modes of selection is the "default" mode of attention (Kawahara, 2010).Strong evidence for stimulus-driven capture has come from the additional-singleton paradigm (Theeuwes, 1992). In this task, observers search for a shape singleton among homogeneous distractors (e.g., a circle among diamonds) and report the orientation of a line that appears inside the target shape. On half of the trials, one of the distractors is a different color, making it a salient singleton distractor. Because the target is never the color singleton, an observer with perfect goal-driven control has no reason to attend to this additional singleton, and the presence of the singleton should not slow response times (RTs) to the target. However, the presence of an irrelevant color singleton does slow RTs to the target (see Theeuwes, 2010, for an extensive review). Because the color singleton is irrelevant to an observer's goal of finding the shape singleton, slowed RTs when the color singleton is present can be ...

Combined Electrophysiological and Behavioral Evidence for the Suppression of Salient Distractors

“…This 17-ms singleton presence benefit is exactly what one would expect if the singleton was suppressed, effectively reducing the relevant set size on singleton-present trials from 4 to 3 (see also Gaspelin et al, 2015, in press; Vatterott & Vecera, 2012). Error rates were not significantly different on singleton-present trials (1.7%) versus singleton-absent trials (1.5%) [ t (19) = 1.037, p =.313, d = .232].…”

Finding a link between guided search and perceptual load theory

“…Some strategies focus on distractor suppression, such as how efficient distractor rejection can occur through experience-dependent tuning of distractor properties (Biggs & Gibson, 2013;Vatterott & Vecera, 2012;Zehetleitner, Goschy, & Müller, 2012), and memory for the context in which a task is performed . A particular attentional set (e.g., feature search versus singleton search) can also affect distractor processing (Bacon & Egeth, 1994), and the relative importance of such strategies appears to depend upon prior experience (Leber & Egeth, 2006a, 2006b) as well as incentive (Müller, Geyer, Zehetleitner, & Krummenacher, 2009).…”

When does feature search fail to protect against attentional capture?

“…To start with, Vatterott and Vecera (2012) found that resistance to capture does not occur immediately during a feature search. In Experiment 1, the color of the color singleton was changed after each 48-trial block.…”

“…Existing evidence (e.g., Vatterott & Vecera, 2012; Zehetleitner et al, 2012) already suggests that both strong bottom-up and top-down models are incomplete and that selection history must be taken into account. However, these experimental designs have involved making changes in stimuli across blocks of trials, and thus involve the violation of fairly stable expectancies.…”