Cued distractor rejection disrupts learned distractor rejection

ABSTRACT

Effective visual search relies on the ability to ignore distracting information. Explicitly cuing individuals to ignore a stimulus consistently leads to a pattern of visual attention first attending the to-be-ignored stimulus before the system learns to reject it. Individuals can learn to overcome this cued distraction with experience, but the visual attentional system is more adept at learning to reject distractors without explicit cuing (Stilwell, B. T., & Vecera, S. P. (2018). Learned and cued distractor rejection for multiple features in visual search. Attention Perception and Psychophysics. doi:10.3758/s13414-018-1622-8). We asked if learning to reject distracting information prior to explicit cuing would help to counteract the deleterious effects of cuing. In two experiments examining learned and cued distractor rejection, individuals searched through heterogeneously coloured arrays containing reliable, non-target colour information. In Experiment 1, half-way through the experiment, we began explicitly cuing a previously learned-to-ignore distractor feature. Prior to the cue, individuals demonstrated learned distractor rejection, but critically, following the cue, individuals demonstrated cued distraction effects. Critically, the cued distraction effects were eliminated by the end of the experiment. In Experiment 2, we again began cuing participants which colour to ignore half-way through the experiment, but instead, to a colour that had no previous rejection learning. Following the cue, individuals again experienced cued distraction, and critically, these cued distraction effects persisted throughout the remainder of the experiment. These results suggest that learned distractor rejection is better suited to experience-driven learning than explicitly cued distractor learning. Additionally, previous distractor rejection learning does not prevent cued distraction, but does appear to help attention to recover from cued distraction.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual search
• cued distraction
• learned distractor rejection

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We note that this pattern of results may appear to contradict those reported in Cunningham and Egeth (2016). Specifically, they found that individuals could recover from an explicit cue, without any prior distractor rejection learning (Experiment 2a). Our failure to observe this same pattern could be due to different display sizes and time courses for distractor rejection. We used display sizes of 8, whereas, Cunningham and Egeth (2016) used display sizes of 12 (Experiment 2) and 4 (Experiment 1). With smaller set sizes, and subsequently less distractors to reject, it takes longer to demonstrate learned distractor rejection. In Experiment 1 of Cunningham and Egeth (2016) the pattern of distractor rejection did not emerge until block 4. Distractor rejection occurs much sooner for larger display sizes and more items to reject (6 distractors out of 12 stimuli in Experiment 2 of Cunningham & Egeth, 2016). If we gave individuals more experience with ignore cues, then perhaps they would eventually reduce, eliminate, or reverse the cued distraction effect.