Location-based explanations do not account for active attentional suppression

ABSTRACT

Recent behavioural research has provided support for an active attentional suppression of known distractor items. Reaction times are faster when participants are informed of the colour of distractors composing half of a search array than when being provided with no information about distractor colour (Arita, J. T., Carlisle, N. B., & Woodman, G. F. (2012). Templates for rejection: Configuring attention to ignore task-irrelevant features. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 38(3), 580–584. doi:10.1037/a0027885). Arita and colleagues concluded participants must be actively suppressing the known distractor colour to aid search performance. However, two proposed location-based strategies may serve as potential alternative explanations for these results (Beck, V. M., & Hollingworth, A. (2015). Evidence for negative feature guidance in visual search is explained by spatial recoding. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 41(5), 1190–1196; Moher, J., & Egeth, H. E. (2012). The ignoring paradox: Cueing distractor features leads first to selection, then to inhibition of to-be-ignored items. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 74(8), 1590–1605). In this study, we assess each of these location-based alternative explanations in turn. In Experiment 1, we use ERPs to examine early attentional deployments to determine whether cued distractors may first be attended before they are suppressed. In Experiment 2, we assess the proposal that participants use a location-based search strategy instead of deploying active attentional suppression. In both experiments, we find no evidence that participants are using location-based strategies to perform the tasks. These results are consistent with active attentional suppression serving as a component of our attentional architecture.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention
• distractor suppression
• attentional control
• N2pc
• ERP

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Katie White, Monira Mubaarak, & Karen Huang for help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Note: in this design, it is impossible to differentiate an N2pc toward the attended hemifield and a Pd (Hickey, Di Lollo, & McDonald, 2009) toward the unattended hemifield. Either ERP component would lead to the same ERP results, and both would be in line with the active suppression account.

2 To view the visual instructions documents and verbal instructions script for participants in this study, please visit: https://osf.io/s8762/?view_only=df5053e29fb64b40b3c5b05c053b0475.