Statistical regularities cause attentional suppression with target-matching distractors

Kerzel, Dirk; Cong, Stanislas Huynh · 2020 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3758/s13414-020-02206-9

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Summary

This study investigates whether attentional suppression—a mechanism that reduces processing of irrelevant stimuli below baseline levels—occurs when distractors share the same features as the target. While attentional suppression is well-documented for distractors with distinct features (e.g., a color distractor in a shape search), evidence for suppression with target-matching distractors has been inconsistent. The authors aimed to resolve this by testing if statistical regularities in cue location could induce suppression in a contingent capture paradigm, where cues match the target’s color. The researchers conducted three experiments using a cue-target paradigm. Participants searched for a colored target (a rotated letter T) among achromatic nontargets. A brief cue, matching the target’s color, appeared 150 ms before the target. In Experiment 1, the cue appeared at one specific location (high-frequency cue position) on 70% of trials and at three other locations on the remaining 30%. This design allowed the authors to isolate two potential markers of suppression: reduced interference from invalid cues at the frequent location and impaired processing of targets appearing at that same location. Experiment 2 served as a control, using a cue color that did not match the target to test if suppression depended on feature-based attention. Experiment 3 examined whether suppression effects persisted into a subsequent block with unbiased cue frequencies. The results from Experiment 1 provided strong evidence for attentional suppression. Invalid cues appearing at the high-frequency location caused significantly less reaction time delay (508 ms) compared to invalid cues at low-frequency locations (533 ms), indicating reduced capture. Crucially, when the target itself appeared at the high-frequency location (with the cue at a low-frequency location), reaction times were significantly slower (562 ms) compared to targets at low-frequency locations (533 ms). This impairment of target processing confirms that the frequent location was actively suppressed rather than merely ignored. Experiment 2 found no such effects when the cue did not match the target color, demonstrating that suppression was guided by feature-based attention. Experiment 3 showed that the suppression effect carried over to a test block with balanced cue frequencies, indicating that the learned suppression persisted even when the statistical regularity was removed. These findings conclude that feature-based attention can guide not only attentional enhancement but also attentional suppression. The study resolves previous inconsistencies by demonstrating that statistical learning of distractor locations leads to active suppression of those locations when the distractors share task-relevant features. This implies that the visual system uses implicit statistical regularities to filter out predictable, salient distractors, even if they match the target template, thereby optimizing visual search efficiency.

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Topics

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• visual search
• attention selective divided