Selection history-driven signal suppression

ABSTRACT

The control of attention is influenced by current goals, physical salience, and selection history. Under certain conditions, physically salient stimuli can be strategically suppressed below baseline levels, facilitating visual search for a target. It is unclear whether such signal suppression is a broad mechanism of selective information processing that extends to other sources of attentional priority evoked by task-irrelevant stimuli, or whether it is particular to physically salient perceptual signals. Using eye movements, in the present study we highlight a case where a former-target-colour distractor facilitates search for a target on a large percentage of trials. Our findings provide evidence that the principle of signal suppression extends to other sources of attentional priority beyond physical salience, and that selection history can be leveraged to strategically guide attention away from a stimulus.

KEYWORDS:

• Selective attention
• attentional capture
• selection history
• signal suppression
• eye movements

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Andy Jeesu Kim http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1124-0213

Notes

1 For distractor-present trials, a non-target other than the former-target-color distractor was fixated on 3.5% of trials (after dividing total fixations by 4 for 4 non-target stimuli present in the display), which was not significantly different from the 3.3% of non-target fixations on distractor-absent trials (p = 0.67), and either measure produces the same statistical conclusions when compared to fixations on the former-target-color distractor.

2 Note that the participants in these two studies overlapped, with those reported in Anderson and Kim (2019b) reflecting the participants who returned to complete a test-retest design, and so the analysis reported here reflects all available data.

3 The same result is obtained if the third block is randomly dropped for some participants using a resampling procedure to equate the frequency of two vs. three blocks across studies.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by grants from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation [NARSAD 26008] and NIH [R01-DA046410] to BAA.