State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, NY, 13902, USA.
Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, McAlester Hall, 320 S. 6th Street, Columbia, MO, 65211, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2024 Jul;86(5):1-14. doi: 10.3758/s13414-024-02903-9. Epub 2024 Jun 5.
Attention must be carefully controlled to avoid distraction by salient stimuli. The signal suppression hypothesis proposes that salient stimuli can be proactively suppressed to prevent distraction. Although this hypothesis has garnered much support, most previous studies have used one class of salient distractors: color singletons. It therefore remains unclear whether other kinds of salient distractors can also be suppressed. The current study directly compared suppression of a variety of salient stimuli using an attentional capture task that was adapted for eye tracking. The working hypothesis was that static salient stimuli (e.g., color singletons) would be easier to suppress than dynamic salient stimuli (e.g., motion singletons). The results showed that participants could ignore a wide variety of salient distractors. Importantly, suppression was weaker and slower to develop for dynamic salient stimuli than static salient stimuli. A final experiment revealed that adding a static salient feature to a dynamic motion distractor greatly improved suppression. Altogether, the results suggest that an underlying inhibitory process is applied to all kinds of salient distractors, but that suppression is more readily applied to static features than dynamic features.
必须仔细控制注意力，以避免被显著刺激物分心。信号抑制假说提出，显著刺激物可以被主动抑制以防止分心。尽管这一假说得到了广泛支持，但大多数先前的研究都使用了一类显著的分心物：颜色 singleton。因此，目前尚不清楚其他类型的显著分心物是否也可以被抑制。本研究使用一种适应眼动追踪的注意捕获任务，直接比较了多种显著刺激物的抑制。工作假说为，静态显著刺激物（例如，颜色 singleton）比动态显著刺激物（例如，运动 singleton）更容易被抑制。结果表明，参与者可以忽略各种显著的分心物。重要的是，与静态显著刺激物相比，动态显著刺激物的抑制作用较弱，发展较慢。最后的实验表明，向动态运动分心物添加静态显著特征会大大改善抑制效果。总之，研究结果表明，一种潜在的抑制过程适用于所有类型的显著分心物，但抑制更容易应用于静态特征而不是动态特征。
