Learned Suppression for Multiple Distractors in Visual Search

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance 2018-07, Vol.44 (7), p.1128-1141
• Main Authors: Won, Bo-Yeong, Geng, Joy J
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Attention; Attention - physiology; Behavior; Collective memory; Color; Color Perception - physiology; Distraction; Female; Generalization (Psychology) - physiology; Human; Human Information Storage; Humans; Male; Manipulation; Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology; Psychomotor Performance - physiology; Stimulus; Target selection; Visual communication; Visual perception; Visual Search; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0096-1523; 1939-1277
• DOI: 10.1037/xhp0000521

Visual search for a target object occurs rapidly if there were no distractors to compete for attention, but this rarely happens in real-world environments. Distractors are almost always present and must be suppressed for target selection to succeed. Previous research suggests that one way this occurs is through the creation of a stimulus-specific distractor template. However, it remains unknown how information within such templates scale up with multiple distractors. Here we investigated the informational content of distractor templates created from repeated exposures to multiple distractors. We investigated this question using a visual search task in which participants searched for a gray square among colored squares. During "training," participants always saw the same set of colored distractors. During "testing," new distractor sets were interleaved with the trained distractors. The critical manipulation in each study was the distance (in color space) of the new test distractors from the trained distractors. We hypothesized that the pattern of distractor interference during testing would reveal the tuning of the suppression template: RTs should be commensurate with the degree to which distractor colors are encoded within the suppression template. Results from four experiments converged on the notion that the distractor template includes information about specific color values, but has broad "tuning," allowing suppression to generalize to new distractors. These results suggest that distractor templates, unlike target templates, encode multiple features and have broad representations, which have the advantage of generalizing suppression more easily to other potential distractors. Public Significance Statement Searching for relevant information within complex environments is cognitively challenging. Decades of research have suggested that successful search is supported by two attentional mechanisms - one that enhances relevant information (i.e., targets) and one that suppresses irrelevant information (i.e., distractors). While much of the research in attention has focused on the former, fewer studies have focused on the latter; those that have suggest that it is possible to actively suppress specific distractor features. No studies, to our knowledge, however, have examined the tuning of suppression templates when there are multiple distractors in a visual search scene, nor how well such templates might generalize to new stimuli. Considering that real-world