No templates for rejection: a failure to configure attention to ignore task-irrelevant features

Out of sight, out of mind: Matching bias underlies confirmatory visual search

“…This is consistent with the finding that the presentation of verbal labels of objects speeds their entry in to awareness (Lupyan & Ward, 2013) and orients attention (Spivey, Tyler, Eberhard, & Tanenhaus, 2001), as well as findings that visually specific templates guide attention better than more abstract templates (Hout & Goldinger, 2014;Maxfield & Zelinsky 2012;Vickery et al, 2005). Furthermore, it is consistent with findings that negative information tends not to guide attention in visual search (Beck & Hollingworth, 2015;Becker, Hemsteger, & Peltier, 2016;Moher & Egeth, 2012).…”

Feature guidance by negative attentional templates depends on search difficulty

“…Previous studies that tested trial-by-trial negative cueing have so far reported rather mixed findings that either do (Arita et al, 2012;Cunningham & Egeth, 2016;Reeder et al, 2017) or do not (Beck & Hollingworth, 2015;Beck et al, 2018;Becker et al, 2016) support the notion of an inhibitory template. The current experiments replicate the basic findings of Reeder et al (2017), while also showing that reliable negative cueing effects may be obtained even when the layout of the search display does not afford rapid spatial redirection of attention from one hemifield that contains items possessing distractor-related features to the other hemifield that contains items possessing target-related features (such as in experiments in which the items in each hemifield are grouped by target and, respectively, distractor color; e.g., Arita et al 2012;Beck & Hollingworth, 2015).…”

“…This may be taken to indicate that negative templates are harder to utilize than positive templates. In addition, there are reports (Beck & Hollingworth, 2015;Becker, Hemsteger, & Peltier, 2016) that benefits from negative cues might become evident only when the target and distractor colours appear in separate hemifields within a given search display (as in Arita et al, 2012). Such structured displays might make participants adopt a particular strategy, namely, to quickly convert the negative (distractor colour-set) cue into a positive (target colour-set) cue (which logically involves inferring the target colour as the single colour in the display that is different from the distractor colour).…”

Inhibition in selective attention

“…It has been proposed that information in working memory about anticipated distracting input can be represented as a rejection template, such that matching distracting input will be strategically inhibited. 11,12,14 This notion of direct top-down attentional inhibition is challenged by behavioral studies showing that cues informing about the upcoming distractor location or feature carry no behavioral benefit 15,27,28 or even hamper performance, when this information varies from trial to trial. 29 in increased distractibility and a prerequisite for successful preparatory inhibition may therefore be that the underlying mechanisms bypass working memory maintenance.…”