TY - JOUR
T1 - Electrophysiological Evidence for the Suppression of Highly Salient Distractors
AU - Stilwell, Brad T.
AU - Egeth, Howard
AU - Gaspelin, Nicholas
N1 - Funding Information:
This project was supported by the National Science Foundation (https://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000001), grant number: BCS-2045624 to N.G.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
PY - 2022/3/31
Y1 - 2022/3/31
N2 - There has been a longstanding debate as to whether salient stimuli have the power to involuntarily capture attention. As a potential resolution to this debate, the signal suppression hypothesis proposes that salient items generate a bottom–up signal that automatically attracts attention, but that salient items can be suppressed by top–down mechanisms to prevent attentional capture. Despite much support, the signal suppression hypothesis has been challenged on the grounds that many prior studies may have used color singletons with relatively low salience that are too weak to capture attention. The current study addressed this by using previous methods to study suppression but increased the set size to improve the relative salience of the color singletons. To assess whether salient distractors captured attention, electrophysiological markers of attentional allocation (the N2pc compo-nent) and suppression (the PD component) were measured. The results provided no evidence of attentional capture, but instead indicated suppression of the highly salient singleton distractors, as indexed by the PD component. This suppression occurred even though a computational model of saliency confirmed that the color singleton was highly salient. Altogether, this supports the signal suppression hypothesis and is inconsistent with stimulus-driven models of attentional capture.
AB - There has been a longstanding debate as to whether salient stimuli have the power to involuntarily capture attention. As a potential resolution to this debate, the signal suppression hypothesis proposes that salient items generate a bottom–up signal that automatically attracts attention, but that salient items can be suppressed by top–down mechanisms to prevent attentional capture. Despite much support, the signal suppression hypothesis has been challenged on the grounds that many prior studies may have used color singletons with relatively low salience that are too weak to capture attention. The current study addressed this by using previous methods to study suppression but increased the set size to improve the relative salience of the color singletons. To assess whether salient distractors captured attention, electrophysiological markers of attentional allocation (the N2pc compo-nent) and suppression (the PD component) were measured. The results provided no evidence of attentional capture, but instead indicated suppression of the highly salient singleton distractors, as indexed by the PD component. This suppression occurred even though a computational model of saliency confirmed that the color singleton was highly salient. Altogether, this supports the signal suppression hypothesis and is inconsistent with stimulus-driven models of attentional capture.
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U2 - 10.1162/jocn_a_01827
DO - 10.1162/jocn_a_01827
M3 - Article
C2 - 35104346
AN - SCOPUS:85127543982
SN - 0898-929X
VL - 34
SP - 787
EP - 805
JO - Journal of cognitive neuroscience
JF - Journal of cognitive neuroscience
IS - 5
ER -