Unpredictable singleton distractors in visual search can be subject to second-order suppression.

ABSTRACT: 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 f

SUBMITTER: Drisdelle BL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11965257 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature