Progress and remaining issues: A response to the commentaries on Luck et al. (2021)

Gaspelin, Nicholas; Luck, Steven J. · 2021 · Visual Cognition

DOI: 10.1080/13506285.2021.1979705

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Summary

This paper responds to commentaries on Luck et al. (2021), which reviewed evidence that observers can learn to suppress attentional capture by salient distractors. Gaspelin and Luck address four recurring themes raised by critics: the role of set size and bottom-up salience, the distinction between reactive and proactive inhibition, the conceptualization of attentional priority versus capture, and the decomposition of capture into distinct cognitive stages. The authors argue that while significant progress has been made, the field lacks independent measures of bottom-up salience and better metrics for tracking the timecourse of attentional control. Regarding salience, the authors counter claims that suppression only occurs when distractors are weakly salient. They cite Chang et al. (2021), who used computational models to demonstrate that color singletons at set size 4 are highly salient, and Stilwell and Gaspelin (in press), who identified a floor effect in Wang and Theeuwes’ (2020) study that obscured suppression at larger set sizes. Evidence from ERP studies (e.g., Gaspar & McDonald, 2014) and eye-tracking data (Gaspelin et al., 2017) further supports suppression at high set sizes. The authors emphasize that without independent psychophysical or computational measures of salience are needed to make the "low salience" defense falsifiable. On the timecourse of suppression, the paper distinguishes between proactive suppression (preventing initial attentional shifts) and reactive suppression (recovery after capture). The authors argue against "rapid disengagement" accounts, which posit that salient items always initially capture attention but are quickly suppressed. They present evidence that proactive suppression can occur within 100–175 ms, preventing initial orienting. They suggest that proactive and reactive mechanisms may operate in parallel or at different levels of selection, and that future research should utilize ERP components (PD/N2pc) and EEG decoding to map the dynamic unfolding of attentional control. The paper also advocates for a theoretical shift from binary "capture" to a continuous "attentional priority" signal. This framework, aligned with biased competition and Guided Search models, posits that priority weights are determined by bottom-up salience, top-down relevance, and learned features. The authors note that the signal suppression hypothesis has evolved to propose that suppression reduces feature gain before priority computation, explaining why specific features (e.g., color) can be suppressed. Finally, they support Zivony’s (2021) proposal to separate attentional orienting from attentional engagement, noting that distractors may disrupt target processing by preventing orientation to the target without necessarily engaging attention on the distractor itself. The paper concludes that resolving the decades-long debate requires refined theoretical models that distinguish these stages and develop robust metrics for measuring them.

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• attention selective divided