Publications by authors named "E Ruthruff"

We examined whether proactive suppression can be applied on demand. A prompt cue indicated the to-be-ignored distractor color for each trial. Participants needed to use this cue to know which of two target shapes to respond to.

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Can people perform two novel tasks in parallel? Available evidence and prevailing theories overwhelmingly indicate that the answer is no, due to stubborn capacity limitations in central stages (e.g., a central bottleneck).

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Does the suppression of irrelevant visual features require attentional resources? McDonald et al. (2023, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 30, 224-234) proposed that suppression processes are unavailable while a person is busy performing another task. They reported the absence of the P (believed to index suppression) when two tasks were presented close together in time.

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There is emerging evidence that suppressing distractors occur to prevent capture by those distractors. Theeuwes (2022) claimed that the absence of capture is not because of suppression but rather because a difficult, serial search causes salient distractors to fall outside of the attentional window. Here, we question this attentional window view by describing evidence that (a) for color singletons, capture fails to occur with an easy search, and (b) for abrupt onsets, capture does occur in a difficult search.

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Despite the obvious importance of facial expressions of emotion, most studies have found that they do not bias attention. A critical limitation, however, is that these studies generally present face distractors on all trials of the experiment. For other kinds of emotional stimuli, such as emotional scenes, infrequently presented stimuli elicit greater attentional bias than frequently presented stimuli, perhaps due to suppression or habituation.

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