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Feature-based attentional control for distractor suppression

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Abstract

To investigate whether attentional suppression is merely a byproduct of target facilitation or a result of independent mechanisms for distractor suppression, the present study examined whether attentional suppression takes place when target facilitation hardly occurs using a spatial cueing paradigm. Participants searched for target letters that were not red, i.e., a negative color. On each trial, a target color was randomly chosen among 12 colors to prevent establishing attentional control for target colors and to reduce intertrial priming for target colors. Immediately before a target display, a noninformative spatial cue was presented at one of the possible target locations. The cue was rendered in a negative color, which was to be ignored, to detect targets or the reference color, which was never presented for target and non-target letters. Experiment 1 showed that negative color cues captured attention less than reference color cues, suggesting feature-based attentional suppression. The suppression effect was replicated when the temporal interval between the onsets of the cue and target displays was reduced in Experiments 2 and 3, suggesting proactive suppression. Experiment 3 directly confirmed no attentional control settings for target colors and intertrial priming. These findings suggest that distractor features can guide attention at the pre-attentive stage when target features are not used to attend to targets.

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Data availability

The data from the experiments are available at https://osf.io/dn2va.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF-2021R1I1A1A01055027, NRF-2020R1A2C2012033) and a Korea University Grant.

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  1. School of Psychology, Korea University, 145, Anam-ro, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, Korea

    Sunghyun Kim & Yang Seok Cho

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  1. Sunghyun Kim
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Correspondence to Sunghyun Kim.

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The original online version of this article was revised: The sentence "Therefore, the presence of attentional suppression mechanisms is somewhat questionable" in the original article should be revised to read "Therefore, the presence of attentional suppression mechanisms is little questionable".

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Kim, S., Cho, Y.S. Feature-based attentional control for distractor suppression. Atten Percept Psychophys 86, 1075–1085 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-024-02858-x

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