When does feature search fail to protect against attentional capture?

Abstract

When participants search for a shape (e.g., a circle) among a set of homogenous shapes (e.g., triangles) they are subject to distraction by color singletons that are more salient than the target. However, when participants search for a shape among heterogeneous shapes, the presence of a non-target color singleton does not slow responses to the target. Attempts have been made to explain these results from both bottom-up and top-down perspectives. What both accounts have in common is that they do not predict the occurrence of attentional capture on typical feature search displays. Here, we present a case where manipulating selection history, rather than the displays themselves, leads to attentional capture on feature search trials. The ability to map specific colors to the target and distractor appears to be what enables resistance to capture during feature search.

Oculomotor inhibition of salient distractors: Voluntary inhibition cannot override selection history

“…In summary, there are several studies indicating that implicit learning processes play a crucial role in visual search. However, the role that selection history plays in the inhibition of salient-but-irrelevant items is currently unclear (but see Becker, 2010;Cunningham & Egeth, 2016;Feldmann-Wüstefeld & Schubö, 2016;Gaspelin & Luck, 2018a;Graves & Egeth, 2016;Vatterott & Vecera, 2012). Importantly, selection history could offer a simple resolution between the seemingly discrepant findings between studies showing that salient items can be proactively inhibited or studies showing that attention must first be shifted to the to-be-ignored items before inhibition.…”

Top-down, bottom-up and selection-history-based control of attention: A failed trichotomy? The case of Priming of pop-out (PoP)

“…A similar interpretation can also apply to Graves and Egeth's (2015) findings. They used a task in which the target was defined by its shape and participants could not search for a singleton to find the target (feature-search mode).…”

“…When inhibition is not possible because the color sets do overlap, attention is drawn more strongly to a color singleton when it has the previous trial's target color. Thus, according to Graves and Egeth (2015), PoP affects attentional priority, in line with the feature weighting account (e.g., Maljkovic & Nakayama, 1994;Wolfe, 2007). However, in this study also, the larger distractor interference observed on swap trials does not necessarily reflect that the distractor captured attention on a higher proportion of trials (i.e., that its attentional priority increased).…”

“…A second group of studies used a variant of Theeuwes' (1991) paradigm in which the color singleton distractor had one color and all the remaining items (including the target, that is, the shape singleton) another, with the colors either repeating or swapping unpredictably across trials ( Figure 4B). These studies focused on whether color repetition (i.e., repetition on a task-irrelevant dimension) reduces distractor interference (Graves & Egeth, 2015;.…”

A saliency-specific and dimension-independent mechanism of distractor suppression

“…In an effort to distinguish among multiple potential mechanisms of distractor suppression, Gaspelin and Luck (2018) claimed that first-order feature information is required to suppress distractors, so that suppression is achieved only when there is foreknowledge of the upcoming distractor's feature value (e.g., red, vertical), a finding which also has been observed in earlier studies (Graves & Egeth, 2016;Kerzel & Barras, 2016). However, there is also evidence in favor of second-order singleton suppression (Sauter,Liesefeld, & Müller, 2019;Won, Kosoyan, & Geng, 2019), which implies local feature discontinuities on a specific feature dimension can be suppressed even when foreknowledge of the upcoming distractor's feature value is not available.…”