Attentional suppression of dynamic versus static salient distractors

Abstract

Attention must be carefully controlled to avoid distraction by salient stimuli. The signal suppression hypothesis proposes that salient stimuli can be proactively suppressed to prevent distraction. Although this hypothesis has garnered much support, most previous studies have used one class of salient distractors: color singletons. It therefore remains unclear whether other kinds of salient distractors can also be suppressed. The current study directly compared suppression of a variety of salient stimuli using an attentional capture task that was adapted for eye tracking. The working hypothesis was that static salient stimuli (e.g., color singletons) would be easier to suppress than dynamic salient stimuli (e.g., motion singletons). The results showed that participants could ignore a wide variety of salient distractors. Importantly, suppression was weaker and slower to develop for dynamic salient stimuli than static salient stimuli. A final experiment revealed that adding a static salient feature to a dynamic motion distractor greatly improved suppression. Altogether, the results suggest that an underlying inhibitory process is applied to all kinds of salient distractors, but that suppression is more readily applied to static features than dynamic features.