Salience matters: Distractors may, or may not, speed target-absent searches

Lawrence, Rebecca; Pratt, Jay

doi:10.3758/s13414-021-02406-x

Cited by 10 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 31 publications

(52 reference statements)

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“…The search accuracy rates across different conditions are shown in Table 1. A two-way ANOVA over the search accuracy data showed that there was a significant main effect of target, F(1, 19) = 16.170, p = .001, η p 2 = .460, in that accuracy rates were lower overall when the target was present (M = 98.1%) than when the target was absent (M = 99.3%), consistent with the findings of previous research (e.g., Chun & Wolfe, 1996;Lawrence & Pratt, 2022;Moher, 2020;Treisman & Gelade, 1980). The main effect of distractor was just significant, F(1, 19) = 5.381, p = .032, η p 2 = .221, with lower accuracy rates on matching-distractor trials (M = 98.4%) than on mismatching-distractor trials (M = 98.9%).…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 88%

“…It is therefore conceivable that the currently observed distractor effect on search termination is exclusively generated through active maintenance of information in visual working memory. The present results extend previous work, which has established that the presence of a physically salient distractor causes search termination to occur earlier (Moher, 2020; but see Lawrence & Pratt, 2022). Here, we further corroborate distractor effects on quitting behavior in visual search by demonstrating that the presence of a distractor matching the content of visual working memory causes search termination to occur later.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

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The presence of a distractor matching the content of working memory induces delayed quitting in visual search

Pan

2022

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Previous research has shown that the presence of a distractor object matching the current content of working memory interacts with visual search. Because finding a target and quitting a search without finding a target may be implemented by qualitatively different processes, it is possible that the effects of a memory-matching distractor on target-present trials and on target-absent trials reveal different mechanisms by which the memory-matching distractor interacts with visual search. Although previous studies have well established the effect of attentional capture by a memory-matching distractor when the target object is found in the search display, there remains an open question about whether the presence of a memory-matching distractor can affect the process of search termination when no target is found. In the present study, we showed that search termination times on targetabsent trials were delayed by the presence of a distractor matching the content of visual working memory. This delayed quitting effect cannot be conceived of as a more general influence of visual short-term memory, because the presence of a distractor matching the content of passive visual short-term memory (i.e., visual priming) did not influence quitting behavior in visual search. These findings offer a novel perspective that distractors matching the information maintained in visual working memory can cause observers to delay search termination when no target has been found.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 88%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

The presence of a distractor matching the content of working memory induces delayed quitting in visual search

Pan

2022

Atten Percept Psychophys

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“…These effects were consistent across age and did not depend on the child explicitly recognizing their caregiver during the task. These results are consistent with recent findings demonstrating that the presence of highly salient distractors makes adults more likely to stop searching early (Lawrence & Pratt, 2022; Moher, 2020). These error data suggest that caregiver faces, more so than stranger faces, were highly salient distractors that may have led participants to abort their search.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Caregiver faces capture 6- to 10-year-old children’s attention during an online visual search task.

Hunter¹,

Markant²

2023

Developmental Psychology

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Developing attention skills allow children to parse their complex world by orienting to a subset of especially salient or meaningful inputs. Infants and children are biased to orient to faces and have difficulty ignoring faces when they appear as distractors. Although these past findings suggest that faces are more salient than nonsocial stimuli, it is unclear whether specific types of faces capture attention to a greater extent than others. Caregiver faces are one of the most prevalent and socially motivating stimuli in infants’ and children’s environments, suggesting that they may be biased to orient to caregiver faces to a greater extent than faces in general. Forty-six 6- to 10-year-old children across the United States and Canada completed an online attention capture task in which participants searched for a target within arrays containing multiple distractors. During some trials, either a stranger or the child’s caregiver’s face appeared as one of the distractors. Children showed consistently poorer performance (i.e., increased omission errors, poorer accuracy, and slower response times) when the caregiver face appeared as a distractor, especially during trials in which the target was present and within larger search arrays. These increased performance costs indicate an enhanced orienting bias to caregiver faces, which may reflect increased motivational salience of these faces.

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“…Future work could also explore the impact of target presence on the processing of single and multiple salient distractors. Previous work has shown that the presence of a singleton distractor impacts search differently when a target is present or absent (Lawrence & Pratt, 2022; Moher, 2020), and we previously observed overall enhanced P D components when a target was present in the same search display (Drisdelle & Eimer, 2021). Although there were no interactions between target presence and distractor suppression effects in the present work, it will be important to further investigate the impact of this factor on the processing of salient distractors.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 51%

Proactive suppression can be applied to multiple salient distractors in visual search.

Drisdelle¹,

Eimer²

2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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There is a growing body of research demonstrating that the capture of attention by a single salient distractor can be prevented via proactive suppression. In real-world contexts, there are often several distracting events that compete for attention, but it is entirely unknown whether multiple objects can be suppressed concurrently. We used behavioral and electrophysiological measures to investigate the existence and time course of multiple-item suppression. We employed search displays that contained either one or two uniquely colored distractors that differed in their salience (S+ and S−), or no such distractors. Search performance improved with the number of salient distractors, indicating that the suppression of multiple items reduced the effective display set size. This was also the case when the target color was no longer fully predictable, ruling out an alternative explanation in terms of attentional guidance by target templates. In an experiment where S+ and S− always appeared together in the same display, the P D component (a marker of proactive suppression) was triggered exclusively by the more salient distractor (S+), indicative of single-item suppression. However, when displays with one or both salient distractors were intermixed, a reliable P D component was also triggered by S−, even when it was accompanied by S+ in the same display. These results show that multiple concurrent salient signals can be proactively inhibited. They demonstrate that signal suppression processes can be adaptively employed to counteract visual distraction at different locations, in order to facilitate the attentional selection of relevant objects in crowded visual environments. Public Significance StatementThis study shows that humans are capable of suppressing multiple salient but irrelevant visual items simultaneously. This highlights the flexibility of inhibitory mechanisms in selective attention. We provide both behavioral and electrophysiological evidence of multiple distractor suppression.

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Salience matters: Distractors may, or may not, speed target-absent searches

Cited by 10 publications

References 31 publications

The presence of a distractor matching the content of working memory induces delayed quitting in visual search

The presence of a distractor matching the content of working memory induces delayed quitting in visual search

Caregiver faces capture 6- to 10-year-old children’s attention during an online visual search task.

Proactive suppression can be applied to multiple salient distractors in visual search.

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