Drisdelle Brandi Lee, Zivony Alon, Eimer Martin
School of Psychological Science, University of Bristol, Beacon House, Queens Road, Bristol, BS8 1QU, UK.
School of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2025 Apr;87(3):832-847. doi: 10.3758/s13414-025-03028-3. Epub 2025 Feb 26.
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 non-singleton 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.
最近的证据表明，通过抑制可以避免由显著但不相关的干扰物引起的注意力捕获，从而提高视觉搜索的表现。初步证据表明，只能抑制具有恒定且可预测特征的显著干扰物（一阶抑制）。我们表明，之前未能找到关于对不可预测的特征单一物进行二阶抑制的证据，可能是由于特征变异性较低：如果在另一次试验中显著干扰物的颜色很可能是目标颜色，抑制该项目可能会妨碍表现。我们首先验证了一种新的多帧字母探测范式，即观察者对带有目标形状的搜索显示进行计数，并总是尽可能多地报告最后显示中的字母探测。当目标和单一物颜色恒定时（实验1），观察到单一物抑制效应，单一物干扰物位置的探测字母报告频率低于非单一物干扰物位置的探测字母。当使用两种随机交换的目标/单一物颜色时（实验2），未观察到抑制效应，这与之前的研究结果一致。至关重要的是，当目标颜色项目和单一物可以有八种不同的随机颜色之一时（实验3），强大的抑制效应再次出现。这些观察结果表明，一阶抑制并非普遍存在，并且在某些情况下二阶抑制可以应用于单一物干扰物。对于有目标和无目标的显示都观察到了抑制效应，这表明它们不是直接的目标 - 单一物竞争的产物。
