Drisdelle, Brandi Lee and Zivony, Alon and Eimer, Martin (2025) Unpredictable singleton distractors in visual search can be subject to second-order suppression. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 87 , pp. 832-847. ISSN 1943-3921.
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Abstract
Recent evidence suggests that attentional capture by salient-but-irrelevant distractions can be avoided via suppression, thereby improving performance in visual search. Initial evidence suggested it is only possible to suppress salient distractors with constant and predictable features (first-order suppression). We show that previous failures to find evidence for second-order suppression of unpredictable feature singletons may have been due to low feature variability: If it is probable that the salient distractor colour is the target colour on another trial, suppressing this item might hinder performance. We first validated a new multiframe letter-probe paradigm, where observers counted the search displays with a target shape and always reported as many letter probes as possible from the final display. When target and singleton colours were constant (Experiment 1), a singleton suppression effect was observed, with probe letters at the singleton distractor location reported less frequently than those at nonsingleton distractor locations. When two randomly swapped target/singleton colours were employed (Experiment 2), no suppression effect was observed, replicating previous findings. Critically, when target-colour items and the singleton could have one of eight different random colours (Experiment 3), a robust suppression effect reappeared. These observations demonstrate that first-order suppression is not universal, and that second-order suppression can be applied to singleton distractors under some circumstances. Suppression effects were observed for displays with and without targets, suggesting that they are not a product of direct target-singleton competition.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences |
| Depositing User: | Martin Eimer |
| Date Deposited: | 04 Feb 2025 11:37 |
| Last Modified: | 04 Sep 2025 04:50 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/54872 |
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