Feature-blind attentional suppression of salient distractors

Abstract

A recent paper has reported, for the first time, that people are capable of suppressing salient singleton distractors of unknown color if the search task requires them to search for the most prevalent of several shapes in the display. We identify here several potential limitations of the earlier findings. In particular, in the reported experiments, the likelihood of a salient distractor was higher than what is typically studied, the distractor object was similar in shape to the relevant objects, only two colors were studied, the distractor was consistently a fixed shape, and the distractor was always a unique shape different from the search targets. Each of these limitations leaves open some questions about the generality of the findings. We address each of the concerns here, and show, in five experiments, that the ability to suppress distractors of unknown color is a robust finding that is not compromised by the potential limitations identified. When searching for the most prevalent of several shapes in a display, people can indeed suppress capture by otherwise-salient color singleton distractors even when their color is not known in advance (i.e., in a feature-blind manner), facilitating efficient search. The experiments confirm the ability to suppress visual elements based on second-order (e.g., a unique color) or global salience information, and not merely based on first-order (e.g., a specific color) information.

Keywords: Attentional capture; Suppression; Visual attention; Visual search.