Abstract There has been a longstanding debate as to whether salient stimuli have the power to involuntarily capture attention. As a potential resolution to this debate, the signal suppression hypothesis proposes that salient items generate a bottom–up signal that automatically attracts attention, but that salient items can be suppressed by top–down mechanisms to prevent attentional capture. Despite much support, the signal suppression hypothesis has been challenged on the grounds that many prior studies may have used color singletons with relatively low salience that are too weak to capture attention. The current study addressed this by using previous methods to study suppression but increased the set size to improve the relative salience of the color singletons. To assess whether salient distractors captured attention, electrophysiological markers of attentional allocation (the N2pc component) and suppression (the PD component) were measured. The results provided no evidence of attentional capture, but instead indicated suppression of the highly salient singleton distractors, as indexed by the PD component. This suppression occurred even though a computational model of saliency confirmed that the color singleton was highly salient. Altogether, this supports the signal suppression hypothesis and is inconsistent with stimulus-driven models of attentional capture.
more »
« less
The distractor positivity component and the inhibition of distracting stimuli
There has been a long-lasting debate about whether salient stimuli, such as uniquely colored objects, have the ability to automatically distract us. To resolve this debate, it has been suggested that salient stimuli do attract attention but that they can be suppressed to prevent distraction. Some research supporting this viewpoint has focused on a newly discovered ERP component called the distractor positivity (PD), which is thought to measure an inhibitory attentional process. This collaborative review summarizes previous research relying on this component with a specific emphasis on how the PD has been used to understand the ability to ignore distracting stimuli. In particular, we outline how the PD component has been used to gain theoretical insights about how search strategy and learning can influence distraction. We also review alternative accounts of the cognitive processes indexed by the PD component. Ultimately, we conclude that the PD component is a useful tool for understanding inhibitory processes related to distraction and may prove to be useful in other areas of study related to cognitive control.
more » « less- PAR ID:
- 10522427
- Publisher / Repository:
- MIT Press Direct
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
- Volume:
- 35
- Issue:
- 11
- ISSN:
- 0898-929X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1693 to 1715
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
more » « less
Abstract It has been debated whether salient distractors in visual search can be proactively suppressed to completely prevent attentional capture, as the occurrence of proactive suppression implies that the initial shift of attention is not entirely driven by physical salience. While the presence of a Pd component in the EEG (associated with suppression) without a preceding N2pc component (associated with selection) has been used as evidence for proactive suppression, the link between these ERPs and the underlying mechanisms is not always clear. This is exemplified in two recent articles that observed the same waveform pattern, where an early Pd-like component flipped to a N2pc-like component, but provided vastly different interpretations (Drisdelle, B. L., & Eimer, E. PD components and distractor inhibition in visual search: New evidence for the signal suppression hypothesis. Psychophysiology, 58, e13898, 2021; Kerzel, D., & Burra, N. Capture by context elements, not attentional suppression of distractors, explains the PD with small search displays. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 32, 1170–1183, 2020). Using RAGNAROC (Wyble et al., Understanding visual attention with RAGNAROC: A Reflexive Attention Gradient through Neural AttRactOr Competition. Psychological Review, 127, 1163–1198, 2020), a computational model of reflexive attention, we successfully simulated this ERP pattern with minimal changes to its existing architecture, providing a parsimonious and mechanistic explanation for this flip in the EEG that is unique from both of the previous interpretations. Our account supports the occurrence of proactive suppression and demonstrates the benefits of incorporating computational modeling into theory building.
-
Researchers have long debated whether salient distractors have the power to automatically capture attention. Recent research has suggested a potential resolution, called the signal suppression hypothesis, whereby salient distractors produce a bottom-up salience signal, but can be suppressed to prevent visual distraction. This account, however, has been criticized on the grounds that previous studies may have used distractors that were only weakly salient. This claim has been difficult to empirically test because there are currently no well-established measures of salience. The current study addresses this by introducing a psychophysical technique to measure salience. First, we generated displays that aimed to manipulate the salience of two color singletons via color contrast. We then verified that this manipulation was successful using a psychophysical technique to determine the minimum exposure duration required to detect each color singleton. The key finding was that high-contrast singletons were detected at briefer exposure thresholds than low-contrast singletons, suggesting that high-contrast singletons were more salient. Next, we evaluated the participants’ ability to ignore these singletons in a task in which they were task irrelevant. The results showed that, if anything, high-salience singletons were more strongly suppressed than low-salience singletons. These results generally support the signal suppression hypothesis and refute claims that highly salient singletons cannot be ignored.more » « less
-
more » « less
Many people have the intuition that interacting with natural environments benefits their psychological health. But what has research actually demonstrated about the benefits of nature experience and the potential mechanisms underlying those benefits? This article describes empirical research on the cognitive benefits of interacting with natural environments and several theories that have been proposed to explain these effects. We also propose future directions that may be useful in exploring the extent of nature’s effects on cognitive performance and some potential mediating factors. Specifically, exposure to a variety of natural stimuli (vs. urban stimuli) consistently improves working memory performance. One potential mechanism for this is the perception of low-level features of natural environments, such as edge density in the visual domain. Although low-level features have been shown to carry semantic information and influence behavior, additional studies are needed to indicate whether perceiving these features in isolation is necessary or sufficient for obtaining the cognitive benefits of interacting with nature.
-
more » « less
Abstract The study of how bilingualism is linked to cognitive processing, including executive functioning, has historically focused on comparing bilinguals to monolinguals across a range of tasks. These group comparisons presume to capture relatively stable cognitive traits and have revealed important insights about the architecture of the language processing system that could not have been gleaned from studying monolinguals alone. However, there are drawbacks to using a group-comparison, or Traits, approach. In this theoretical review, we outline some limitations of treating executive functions as stable traits and of treating bilinguals as a uniform group when compared to monolinguals. To build on what we have learned from group comparisons, we advocate for an emerging complementary approach to the question of cognition and bilingualism. Using an approach that compares bilinguals to themselves under different linguistic or cognitive contexts allows researchers to ask questions about how language and cognitive processes interact based on dynamically fluctuating cognitive and neural states. A States approach, which has already been used by bilingualism researchers, allows for cause-and-effect hypotheses and shifts our focus from questions of group differences to questions of how varied linguistic environments influence cognitive operations in the moment and how fluctuations in cognitive engagement impact language processing.
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_02051
