Evidence against the low-salience account of attentional suppression.

Do salient distractors have the power to automatically capture attention? This question has led to a heated debate concerning the role of salience in attentional control. A potential resolution, called the signal suppression hypothesis, has proposed that salient items produce a bottom-up signal that vies for attention, but that salient stimuli can be suppressed via top-down control to prevent the capture of attention. This hypothesis, however, has been criticized on the grounds that the distractors used in initial studies of support were weakly salient.

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.

The role of salience in the suppression of distracting stimuli.

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.

A new technique for estimating the probability of attentional capture.

Latency-based metrics of attentional capture are limited: They indicate whether or not capture occurred, but they do not indicate how often capture occurred. The present study introduces a new technique for estimating the probability of capture. In a spatial cueing paradigm, participants searched for a target letter defined by color while attempting to ignore salient cues that were drawn in either a relevant or irrelevant color.

Learned distractor rejection persists across target search in a different dimension.

Attention is guided by several factors, including task-relevant target features, which attract attention, but also statistical regularities associated distractors, which repel attention away from themselves. However, whether feature-based distractor regularities (e.g.