Abstract
We are often bombarded with salient stimuli that capture our attention and distract us from our current goals. Decades of research have shown the robust detrimental impacts of salient distractors on search performance and, of late, in leading to altered feature perception. These feature errors can be quite extreme, and thus, undesirable. In search tasks, salient distractors can be suppressed if they appear more frequently in one location, and this learned spatial suppression can lead to reductions in the cost of distraction as measured by reaction time slowing. Can learned spatial suppression also protect against visual feature errors? To investigate this question, participants were cued to report one of four briefly presented colored squares on a color wheel. On two-thirds of trials, a salient distractor appeared around one of the nontarget squares, appearing more frequently in one location over the course of the experiment. Participants' responses were fit to a model estimating performance parameters and compared across conditions. Our results showed that general performance (guessing and precision) improved when the salient distractor appeared in a likely location relative to elsewhere. Critically, feature swap errors (probability of misreporting the color at the salient distractor’s location) were also significantly reduced when the distractor appeared in a likely location, suggesting that learned spatial suppression of a salient distractor helps protect the processing of target features. This study provides evidence that, in addition to helping us avoid salient distractors, suppression likely plays a larger role in helping to prevent distracting information from being encoded.
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Data availability
Experiment plans and data are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/gcs4e/).
Code availability
Experimental code is available upon request.
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Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of India Carter, Jayanth Donthireddy, Haley McIntyre, John McNally, and Veronica Olaker in the recruitment of participants and data collection. This research was supported in part by NSF grant BCS-1848939 (JG and AL) and by an NSERC PDF (BD).
Open Practices Statement
This experiment was pre-registered on the Open Science Framework (OSF; https://osf.io/ys3kc/) prior to starting data collection. Our original theoretical motivation, sample size stopping rule, exclusion criteria, methods, and analyses can be found there. Any analyses included here that were not listed in the pre-registration are declared as exploratory. Data is available on OSF (https://osf.io/gcs4e/).
Funding
This study was funded in part by NSF grant BCS-1848939 (JG and AL) and an NSERC PDF to BD.
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Narhi-Martinez, W., Dube, B., Chen, J. et al. Suppression of a salient distractor protects the processing of target features. Psychon Bull Rev 31, 223–233 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02339-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02339-6