Salience determines attentional orienting in visual selection.
Benchi Wang, Jan Theeuwes
Abstract
Recently the signal-suppression account was proposed, positing that salient stimuli automatically produce a bottom-up salience signal that can be suppressed via top-down control processes. Evidence for this hybrid account came from a capture-probe paradigm that showed that while searching for a specific shape, observers suppressed the location of the irrelevant color singleton. Here we replicate these findings but also show that this occurs only for search arrays with 4 elements. For larger array sizes when both target and distractor singleton are salient, there is no evidence for suppression; instead and consistent with the stimulus-driven account, there is clear evidence that the salient distractor captured attention. The current study shows that the relative salience of items in the display is a crucial factor in attentional control. In displays with a few heterogeneous items, top-down suppression is possible. However, in larger displays in which both target and distractor singletons are salient, no top-down suppression is observed. We conclude that the signal-suppression account cannot resolve the long-standing debate regarding stimulus-driven and goal-driven attentional capture. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).