An official website of the United States government
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
Abstract 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
-
-
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.more » « less
-
Numerous studies in cognitive development have examined the relation between children’s developing inhibitory control and their social cognition, including false belief, selective trust, and children’s understanding of fairness norms. This research typically finds correlations between performance on inhibitory control measures and developmental milestones in social cognitive development, such as success on false belief measures, actively recognizing deceptive agents, and rejecting advantageous inequities. These studies, however, do not describe the role of inhibitory control as children are making these social cognitive inferences. We use reach trajectory tracking – a method commonly used with adults – to isolate the role of distinct inhibitory control mechanisms as children make such inferences. After describing this method, we present three case studies that describe how different inhibitory mechanisms are involved in understanding others’ false beliefs, selective learning from human vs. non-human stimuli, and making inferences about fair resource distributions. Taken together, these studies suggest that different inhibitory mechanisms relate to social evaluations about other people as opposed to evaluations of the information generated by others. Further, reach tracking offers a natural way of studying the role of inhibitory control in cognitive development, as children are making decisions.more » « less
-
ABSTRACT Anthropogenic noise pollution levels are increasing in natural communities with numerous impacts on the behavior of animals, including recent studies demonstrating that noise negatively affects cognitive performance in birds. However, there are also examples of avian species inhabiting or even thriving in urbanized habitats, suggesting that animals might overcome the challenges posed by anthropogenic noise, perhaps by habituating with repeated exposure. We examined whether zebra finches habituate to road noise when presented with continuous playback of road traffic noise versus intermittent noise playback as they learned novel foraging tasks. We hypothesized that birds exposed to continuous traffic noise during and between repeated trials would demonstrate higher cognitive performance than birds with intermittent exposure. We used a battery of foraging tasks that measured different aspects of cognition, including inhibitory control, motor learning, color association, and spatial memory. We found that birds presented with continuous noise exposure had higher performance scores in the motor learning and spatial memory tasks, but we did not observe differences between treatments for inhibitory control or color association tasks. These results suggest that birds were unable to broadly habituate to the traffic playback. Instead, habituation or reduced distraction could occur only in some cognitive domains; certain cognitive activities or modules could be more sensitive to noise‐induced cognitive impairment than others, or other intrinsic factors might determine an animal's response to distracting stimuli.more » « less
-
A long-standing debate in the study of cognitive aging concerns whether aging results in a selective deficit in inhibitory control beyond a general slowing of cognitive processing. Previous studies have obtained mixed findings, in part because the typical free response time paradigm lacks the specificity required to disentangle component processes underlying inhibitory control. Here, we apply a novel forced-response paradigm and a computational model to disentangle these processes to test if aging results in overall speed differences or a selective deficit in inhibitory control. 50 older adults and 57 younger adults completed a “forced-response” arrow flanker task. We find strong evidence that older adults demonstrate a global slowing of processing, without any selective deficit in inhibitory control. Furthermore, we demonstrate global slowing is sufficient to explain the mixed findings in previous free RT studies. Overall, these results highlight the utility of using a theory-informed, fine-grained approach to study inhibitory control.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_02051
