Proactive suppression is an implicit process that cannot be summoned on demand.

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.

Uncorking the central bottleneck: Even novel tasks can be performed automatically.

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).

Evidence that proactive distractor suppression does not require attentional resources.

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.

Shattering the Attentional Window: What Really Determines Capture by Abrupt Onsets and Color Singletons?

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.

Infrequent facial expressions of emotion do not bias attention.

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.

On preventing capture: Does greater salience cause greater suppression?

It has been proposed that salient objects have high potential to disrupt target performance, and so people learn to proactively suppress them, thereby preventing these salient distractors from capturing attention in the future. Consistent with this hypothesis, Gaspar et al. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(13), 3693-3698, 2016) reported that the P (believed to index suppression) was larger for high-salient color distractors than for low-salient color distractors.

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.

Do salient abrupt onsets trigger suppression?

Many studies have indicated that abrupt onsets can capture our attention involuntarily. The present study examined whether task-irrelevant onsets trigger strong suppression of their features, to reduce the ability of the onsets to capture attention. We used a capture-probe paradigm with salient abrupt onsets as precues.

Oculomotor suppression of abrupt onsets versus color singletons.

There is considerable evidence that salient items can be suppressed in order to prevent attentional capture. However, this evidence has relied almost exclusively on paradigms using color singletons as salient distractors. It is therefore unclear whether other kinds of salient stimuli, such as abrupt onsets, can also be suppressed.

Bypassing the central bottleneck with easy tasks: Beyond ideomotor compatibility.

Maquestiaux, Lyphout-Spitz, Ruthruff, and Arexis (2020) demonstrated that ideomotor-compatible (IM) tasks (e.g., pressing the left key when an arrow points left) can operate automatically, entirely bypassing the central bottleneck that constrains dual-task performance.

On preventing attention capture: Is singleton suppression actually singleton suppression?

It is commonly assumed that salient singletons generate an "attend-to-me signal" which causes suppression to develop over time, eventually preventing capture. Despite this assumption and the name "singleton suppression," a causal link between salience and suppression has not yet been clearly established. We point out the plausibility of a simple alternative mechanism: distractors might be suppressed because they are distractors rather than targets, even when non-salient.

Capacity-free automatic processing of facial expressions of emotion.

Are facial expressions of emotion processed automatically? Some authors have not found this to be the case (Tomasik et al., 2009). Here we revisit the question with a novel experimental logic-the backward correspondence effect (BCE).

Testing the over-reliance on central attention (ORCA) hypothesis: Do older adults have difficulty automatizing especially easy tasks?

Does aging increase the reliance on central attention to carry out tasks, even when those tasks do not need it? To test the hypothesis of over-reliance on central attention (ORCA), we examined the ability of older adults to entirely bypass ideomotor-compatible (IM) tasks. IM tasks operate automatically for younger adults: The perception of an IM stimulus (e.g.

No identification of abrupt onsets that capture attention: evidence against a unified model of spatial attention.

Many studies have reported that spatial attention can be involuntarily captured by salient stimuli such as abrupt onsets. These involuntary shifts are often assumed to have the same effects on feature extraction as voluntary shifts: there are two different ways of moving the same attentional mechanism. According to this unified model of spatial attention, all shifts of attention should enhance the identification of attended objects.

Attentional dwelling and capture by color singletons.

Can salient stimuli-such as color singletons and abrupt onsets-involuntarily capture spatial attention? We previously reported evidence that abrupt onsets can capture attention, but the effects of this capture can become latent under easy visual search. The present experiments examined whether a similar pattern of latent capture occurs for task-irrelevant color singletons. Participants searched for a perfect circle among oval distractors.

Ideomotor compatibility enables automatic response selection.

A task is ideomotor (IM)-compatible when there is high conceptual similarity between the stimulus and the associated response (e.g., pressing a left key when an arrow points to the left).

Case mixing impedes early lexical access: converging evidence from the masked priming paradigm.

When letters are presented in mixed case (e.g., "PlAnE), word recognition is slowed.

Electrophysiological examination of response-related interference while dual-tasking: is it motoric or attentional?

The possibility that interference between motor responses contributes to dual-task costs has long been neglected, yet is supported by several recent studies. There are two competing hypotheses regarding this response-related interference. The motor-bottleneck hypothesis asserts that the motor stage of Task 1 triggers a refractory period that delays the motor stage of Task 2.

Multiple routes to word recognition: evidence from event-related potentials.

We used event-related potentials to determine whether lexical access during semantic processing is achieved solely by the letter-based route, or by both a letter-based and word-based route. Participants determined whether words were related or unrelated to a prespecified category. To disrupt the word-based route (i.

Dual-task automatization: The key role of sensory-motor modality compatibility.

How do people automatize their dual-task performance through bottleneck bypassing (i.e., accomplish parallel processing of the central stages of two tasks)? In the present work we addressed this question, evaluating the impact of sensory-motor modality compatibility-the similarity in modality between the stimulus and the consequences of the response.

Successful aging: The role of cognitive gerontology.

This commentary explores the relationships between the construct of successful aging and the experimental psychology of human aging-cognitive gerontology. What can or should cognitive gerontology contribute to understanding, defining, and assessing successful aging? Standards for successful aging reflect value judgments that are culturally and historically situated. Fundamentally, they address social policy; they are prescriptive.

Immunity to attentional capture at ignored locations.

Certain stimuli have the power to rapidly and involuntarily capture spatial attention against our will. The present study investigated whether such stimuli capture spatial attention even when they appear in ignored regions of visual space. In other words, which force is more powerful: attentional capture or spatial filtering? Participants performed a spatial cuing task, searching for a letter target defined by color (e.

Attentional capture in driving displays.

Drivers face frequent distraction on the roadways, but little is known about situations placing them at risk of misallocating visual attention. To investigate this issue, we asked participants to search for a red target embedded within simulated driving scenes (photographs taken from inside a car) in three experiments. Distraction was induced by presenting, via a GPS unit, red or green distractors positioned in an irrelevant location at which the target never appeared.

The problem of latent attentional capture: Easy visual search conceals capture by task-irrelevant abrupt onsets.

Researchers are sharply divided regarding whether irrelevant abrupt onsets capture spatial attention. Numerous studies report that they do and a roughly equal number report that they do not. This puzzle has inspired numerous attempts at reconciliation, none gaining general acceptance.