Signal suppression 2.0: An updated account of attentional capture and suppression

Gaspelin, Nicholas; Ma, Xiaojin; Luck, Steven J. · 2025 · Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

DOI: 10.3758/s13423-025-02736-z

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Summary

This review paper updates the "signal suppression" account of attentional capture, originally proposed in 2010 to resolve the debate between bottom-up (stimulus-driven) and top-down (goal-driven) theories of visual attention. The original theory posited that salient stimuli generate an automatic "attend-to-me" signal that can be suppressed by top-down control before attention is captured. This manuscript synthesizes recent empirical challenges and findings to refine the theory, arguing that suppression is not a generalized squashing of salience but rather a specific, implicit learning process triggered by initial instances of capture. The authors review evidence from event-related potential (ERP) studies, eye-tracking experiments, and behavioral probe tasks to address five major challenges to the original account. First, they refute the "low-salience" claim that only weakly salient distractors can be suppressed, presenting data showing that high-salience distractors are actually easier to suppress than low-salience ones. Second, they disconfirm the "rapid disengagement" hypothesis, which suggested that attention is briefly captured and then quickly rejected; forced-response eye-tracking data show no initial capture in feature-search modes, indicating true suppression rather than rapid rejection. Third, they demonstrate that attentional control involves both the upweighting of target features and the downweighting (suppression) of distractor features, rather than upweighting alone. The updated account introduces two primary revisions. First, suppression operates on specific feature values and locations rather than a generalized salience signal. Evidence shows that observers must learn the specific features of a distractor (first-order suppression) to ignore it, though some conditions allow for suppression based on feature dimensions alone (second-order suppression). Second, and most significantly, the authors argue that suppression reflects implicit learning driven by prior experience, rather than explicit top-down goals. They contend that initial attentional capture is necessary to drive the implicit learning processes that lead to subsequent suppression. Consequently, the revised hypothesis predicts that high-salience distractors, which are more likely to capture attention initially, are easier to learn to suppress. Furthermore, the authors suggest that explicit attempts to override capture may ironically increase distraction, as suppression relies on implicit mechanisms triggered by capture rather than conscious control. These updates provide a more nuanced framework for understanding how the visual system manages distraction through learned, feature-specific inhibitory processes.

Key finding

The updated signal suppression account posits that attentional suppression is driven by implicit learning triggered by initial capture, making high-salience distractors easier to suppress than low-salience ones.

Methodology

review

Provenance

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Topics

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• attention selective divided
• visual search
• inattentional change blindness