Suppression of Salient Objects Prevents Distraction in Visual Search

Gaspar, John; McDonald, John J.

doi:10.1523/jneurosci.4161-13.2014

Cited by 280 publications

(405 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Whereas prior studies used relatively general measures of attentional processing, the N2pc and P D enabled us to pinpoint specific processes and to determine whether the magnitude or timing of these processes correlated with vWM capacity. The N2pc was originally ascribed to suppression of unattended items (22), but more recent work indicates the contralateral negativity reflects selective processing of the attended item (23,38,39), whereas the P D reflects activity associated with the suppression of unattended distractors (23,24; for a review, see ref. 34).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The N2pc, an enhanced negative potential observed contralateral to attended targets, is a well-known electrophysiological index of attentional selection that emerges over the posterior scalp 180-200 ms after the appearance of a search array (21,22). In contrast, the P D is an enhanced positive potential observed contralateral to task-irrelevant distractors in the same time interval (23,24). Two key pieces of evidence indicate that the P D is associated with an active suppression process.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, the P D is present when observers must carefully inspect another task-relevant item (target) but is absent when observers merely have to detect the target (23). Second, the amplitude of the P D is predictive of the speed with which participants respond to a target on a trial-by-trial basis, with faster response times (i.e., less distraction) associated with larger P D amplitudes (24,25). These findings indicate that the visual system resolves attentional competition in demanding identification tasks by suppressing potentially distracting items, but that the ability to suppress, and thus to prevent distraction, varies across trials.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

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Inability to suppress salient distractors predicts low visual working memory capacity

Gaspar

Christie

Prime

et al. 2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

154

163

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According to contemporary accounts of visual working memory (vWM), the ability to efficiently filter relevant from irrelevant information contributes to an individual's overall vWM capacity. Although there is mounting evidence for this hypothesis, very little is known about the precise filtering mechanism responsible for controlling access to vWM and for differentiating low-and high-capacity individuals. Theoretically, the inefficient filtering observed in lowcapacity individuals might be specifically linked to problems enhancing relevant items, suppressing irrelevant items, or both. To find out, we recorded neurophysiological activity associated with attentional selection and active suppression during a competitive visual search task. We show that high-capacity individuals actively suppress salient distractors, whereas low-capacity individuals are unable to suppress salient distractors in time to prevent those items from capturing attention. These results demonstrate that individual differences in vWM capacity are associated with the timing of a specific attentional control operation that suppresses processing of salient but irrelevant visual objects and restricts their access to higher stages of visual processing.suppression | attention | working memory | event-related potentials | distractor positivity E ach day, human observers perform numerous tasks that require temporary storage of information about objects in the surrounding visual environment. Laboratory studies have revealed substantial variability across neurologically healthy adults in the ability to keep such visuospatial information in mind (1-4). Originally, this variability was attributed to individual differences in the capacity of visual working memory (vWM). According to this account, the maximum amount of information that can be entered into vWM at one time, or the number of "slots" available to store the information, varies across individuals (3,(5)(6)(7)(8). Other contemporary accounts, however, relate the individual differences in vWM performance to variability in attentional control, as well as capacity (9-12). One such attention-based perspective holds that when faced with multiple visual objects, low-capacity individuals have difficulty filtering relevant from irrelevant information (11-15). More specifically, this filtering-efficiency hypothesis proposes that attention regulates the flow of sensory information to the limited-capacity vWM system and that consuming capacity with task-irrelevant information effectively reduces storage capacity for task-relevant items. This hypothesis helps to explain why lowcapacity individuals sometimes store more items in vWM than do high-capacity individuals: whereas high-capacity individuals encode only task-relevant items, low-capacity individuals encode irrelevant items along with task-relevant items (15).Although there is mounting evidence for the filtering-efficiency hypothesis, little is known about the precise mechanism responsible for controlling access to vWM or how its operation differs in low...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Inability to suppress salient distractors predicts low visual working memory capacity

Gaspar

Christie

Prime

et al. 2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

154

163

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…To uncover the relationship between working memory capacity and these two mechanisms of attention, Gaspar et al (5) took advantage of neural markers that differentially track target selection and distractor suppression (6,7). Specifically, the authors (5) measured two separate brain waves of the human electroencephalogram: the N2pc, which measures the enhancement of an attended target, and the distractor positivity (P D ), which measures the suppression of distractors.…”

Section: Two Modes Of Attentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tuning in by tuning out distractions

Adam

Vogel

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Working memory is a limited workspace for temporarily holding information in mind, and it is critical for thinking and problem solving. A person's ability to perform a variety of complicated intelligent behaviors, such as abstract reasoning, mathematics, and acquiring new languages, depends greatly on his or her specific working memory capacity. Those with a high capacity perform better on measures of fluid intelligence and scholastic aptitude than their low-capacity counterparts (1, 2). For the past 15 years, much of the work on individual differences in capacity has indicated that differences between people are largely because of attentional control, which allows one to focus on relevant information and ignore distractions (3, 4). However, it has always been unclear whether the advantages of high-capacity individuals are due to their ability to "tune in" the important stuff or to their ability to "tune out" the unimportant stuff. In PNAS, Gaspar et al. (5) provide exciting new evidence that the main benefit of a high-capacity mind is the ability to quickly and effectively suppress distracting information. Two Modes of AttentionIt has been notoriously difficult to figure out whether attention works through enhancement or suppression, because both hypothesized mechanisms of attention lead to the same behavioral outcomes. For example, imagine that you take a call on your phone while the television loudly plays in the background. To make it easier to hear the caller, you can either turn up the volume on your phone (target enhancement) or you can turn down the volume on the television (distractor suppression). In the end, either approach leads to the same result: you hear the phone call better. Luckily, even in the absence of an informative behavioral difference, neural measures can provide key insights into the underlying mechanisms driving behavior.To uncover the relationship between working memory capacity and these two mechanisms of attention, Gaspar et al. (5) took advantage of neural markers that differentially track target selection and distractor suppression (6, 7). Specifically, the authors (5) measured two separate brain waves of the human electroencephalogram: the N2pc, which measures the enhancement of an attended target, and the distractor positivity (P D ), which measures the suppression of distractors. Gaspar et al. (5) first measured each participant's memory capacity using a standard working memory task. Next, they examined how well individuals with different working memory capacities could quickly search for a relevant target while ignoring a salient (but irrelevant) distractor item. Participants were shown 10 colored circles and attempted to locate a uniquely colored target as quickly as possible (e.g., a yellow circle among green circles). On distractorpresent trials, participants needed to ignore a distractor item (e.g., red circle) to quickly find the target. Suppression Is KeyIf higher working memory capacity is related to enhanced selection of the target, then increased N2pc magnitude should...

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“…I took two separate approaches to calculating N2pc and Pd amplitudes. First, I took the traditional approach of simply calculating the mean amplitude across a specified time window that appears to contain the component of interest (e.g., Gaspar & McDonald, 2014;Hickey et al, 2009;Sawaki & Luck, 2010). Based on visual inspection of the grand average waveforms, I selected 180 -260 ms post stimulus onset for the N2pc analysis, and 260 -400 ms post stimulus onset for the Pd analysis (shaded grey in Figure 5-5a).…”

Section: Erp Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Top-down and bottom-up processes in vision

Jacoby¹

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To help us efficiently navigate our information-rich environment, the human brain has developed a set of cognitive mechanisms aimed at quickly identifying information that is likely to be behaviourally relevant, collectively referred to as selective attention. Attentional resources can be directed voluntarily, as occurs when we shift attention from one word to the next while reading; or involuntarily, such as when attention is captured by someone unexpectedly entering the room (Yantis, 2000). These two modes of attention are not as independent and clearly distinguishable as once thought (Gilbert & Li, 2013). For example, the extent to which a stimulus involuntarily captures attention is influenced by whether it possesses features relevant to an observer's current task (the contingent capture hypothesis; Folk, . Attentional capture is also affected by the level of working memory (WM) load an observer is under (Lavie, Hirst, Viding, & De Fockert, 2004), and by an observer's WM capacity (Vogel, McCollough, & Machizawa, 2005).It has been suggested that maintaining top-down biases on attentional capture may require -and compete for -similar neural resources as WM (e.g., Lavie et al., 2004). If so, top-down influences on attentional capture should be reduced (a) when an observer is under high WM load, and (b) in individuals with a low WM capacity. In this thesis these possibilities were tested in a series of seven experiments in which human observers monitored visual stimulus streams for targets defined by a particular feature value (e.g., red). While observers performed these tasks, I took behavioural and electrophysiological measures of attentional capture by distracting visual stimuli that either possessed or did not possess the target feature value. I then investigated whether taxing WM reduces contingent capture. An n-back task that required information-updating eliminated the influence of task set on the distractor-evoked N2pc, suggesting that taxing WM compromised top-down biases on early visual processing. There was no such effect on a behavioural measure of attentional capture, however, possibly because taxing WM also compromised the transfer of information from early visual cortex to later stages of processing. A iii digit rehearsal task that required only information maintenance did not change the effect of task set on either the N2pc or behaviour. This pattern of results suggests that contingent capture is only reduced by WM load manipulations that place demands on the central executive component of WM (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974).Next I tested whether high WM load can reduce the effect of task set on even earlier stages of processing than the N2pc, specifically by measuring the P1 component of the visual-evoked potential. Unexpectedly, I failed to replicate a previous finding of an effect of feature-based task set on the P1. Because I found no effect of task set on the P1, I was unable to test whether such an effect was reduced under high WM load.In a final experiment I examined whether individual dif...

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Suppression of Salient Objects Prevents Distraction in Visual Search

Cited by 280 publications

References 47 publications

Inability to suppress salient distractors predicts low visual working memory capacity

Inability to suppress salient distractors predicts low visual working memory capacity

Tuning in by tuning out distractions

Top-down and bottom-up processes in vision

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