Guidance of visual search by negative attentional templates depends on task demands.

Abstract

Visual search for a target is faster when its features are known before the search display appears, but there is an ongoing discussion about whether knowledge of nontarget features has a similar effect. Stored target or nontarget features used to guide visual search are referred to as positive or negative attentional templates, respectively. We suggest that the inconsistent findings concerning negative attentional templates may arise from 2 methodological choices in past research. The activation of negative attentional templates was never directly assessed and the use of negative attentional templates by the participant was optional. We addressed these issues in the contingent capture paradigm, which provides a marker for the activation of attentional templates in conditions where attentional templates are optional or mandatory. If an attentional template for a color is activated, cuing effects are larger for spatial cues in a matching color than for spatial cues in a nonmatching color. The question is whether the activation of negative attentional templates results in a similar difference between matching and nonmatching colors. We found that negative attentional templates were not activated when the target could be located based on its saliency (singleton search) and the use of the negative attentional template was optional. In contrast, when the negative attentional template was necessary to locate the target (feature search), we found the expected difference between matching and nonmatching spatial cues. Thus, the activation of negative attentional templates depends on task demands. In contrast, positive attentional templates were activated irrespective of task demands.

Assessing recoding accounts of negative attentional templates using behavior and eye tracking.

“…Other recent work has suggested participants will use a positive cue rather than a negative cue if both are provided (Rajsic et al, 2020), in line with the idea that negative cues may require greater cognitive control (de Vries et al, 2019). Similarly, participants use the negative cue when it is required to find the search target, but may ignore it when the target can be located through other strategies (Kerzel & Huynh Cong, 2022). Failures to find evidence of attentional benefits from negative cues could therefore be due to lack of attentional control settings, or the need to overcome a predisposition to use information in working memory to guide attention (Desimone & Duncan, 1995; Olivers et al, 2011; de Vries et al, 2019).…”

Proactive suppression is an implicit process that cannot be summoned on demand.

“…Most of these studies made the suppression optional because one could find the target even without any suppression of distractor features, simply by searching for the target feature such as a letter identity, shape, or gap (e.g., Beck & Hollingworth, 2015;Becker et al, 2015;Ma & Abrams, 2022;Moher & Egeth, 2012;Stilwell & Vecera, 2019a, 2019b. In Moher and Egeth (2012), for example, participants could ignore the color and simply search for the target letters B or F. This argument is supported by Kerzel and Huynh Cong's (2022) finding that participants failed to utilize the to-be-ignored distractor feature (i.e., failed to suppress the distractor) when the target could easily be found based on its uniqueness or salience (i.e., a singleton). Thus, perhaps proactive suppression is available on demand but, in previous studies, was not used because there was insufficient incentive to do so.…”

Top-down suppression of negative features applies flexibly contingent on visual search goals

“…For instance, features maintained in working memory elicit greater attentional capture if reliably associated with a search target instead of with a distractor (Carlisle & Woodman, 2019 ; Kiyonaga et al, 2012 ; Olivers & Eimer, 2011 ). Furthermore, the processing of visual input corresponding to working-memory content might not always be enhanced, but instead also sometimes suppressed based on an observer’s current search goals (Drisdelle & Eimer, 2023 ; Kerzel & Huynh Cong, 2022 ; for reviews, see Carlisle, 2022 ; Noonan et al, 2018 ; van Moorselaar & Slagter, 2020 ).…”

“…However, evidence is still limited on whether top-down control can quickly initiate and switch between the proactive suppression and enhancement of specific features based on flexibly changing task demands. This is due to previous studies mainly comparing visual search performance in positive or neutral versus negative tasks that were realized in separate blocks (e.g., Arita et al, 2012 ; Beck et al, 2018 ; Beck & Hollingworth, 2015 ; Kerzel & Huynh Cong, 2022 ; Zhang et al, 2020 ; Zhang & Carlisle, 2022 ). Thus, features could be ignored for long sequences of trials, and, hence, there was no evidence that top-down suppression is flexible and possible immediately following a switch between different attentional control mechanisms of guidance versus suppression.…”

“…Although evidence suggests that target-defining positive features guide visual attention even when they are not necessary for target search and an alternative easier strategy would be applicable (e.g., Kerzel & Huynh Cong, 2022 ), this might not be the case for to-be-suppressed features. This assumption is based on evidence indicating that suppression is mainly restricted to difficult search tasks (Conci et al, 2019 ) or when using a negative template to suppress a feature is mandatory due to task demands (Kerzel & Huynh Cong, 2022 ).…”