Suppression of salient objects prevents distraction in visual search

To find objects of interest in a cluttered and continually changing visual environment, humans must often ignore salient stimuli that are not currently relevant to the task at hand. Recent neuroimaging results indicate that the ability to prevent salience-driven distraction depends on the current le...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of neuroscience 2014-04, Vol.34 (16), p.5658-5666
Main Authors: Gaspar, John M, McDonald, John J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Analysis of Variance
Attention - physiology
Color Perception - physiology
Competitive Behavior - physiology
Electroencephalography
Evoked Potentials, Visual - physiology
Eye Movements
Female
Functional Laterality - physiology
Humans
Male
Occipital Lobe - physiopathology
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Photic Stimulation
Reaction Time - physiology
Young Adult
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Summary:To find objects of interest in a cluttered and continually changing visual environment, humans must often ignore salient stimuli that are not currently relevant to the task at hand. Recent neuroimaging results indicate that the ability to prevent salience-driven distraction depends on the current level of attentional control activity in frontal cortex, but the specific mechanism by which this control activity prevents salience-driven distraction is still poorly understood. Here, we asked whether salience-driven distraction is prevented by suppressing salient distractors or by preferentially up-weighting the relevant visual dimension. We found that salient distractors were suppressed even when they resided in the same feature dimension as the target (that is, when dimensional weighting was not a viable selection strategy). Our neurophysiological measure of suppression--the PD component of the event-related potential--was associated with variations in the amount of time it took to perform the search task: distractors triggered the PD on fast-response trials, but on slow-response trials they triggered activity associated with working memory representation instead. These results demonstrate that during search salience-driven distraction is mitigated by a suppressive mechanism that reduces the salience of potentially distracting visual objects.
ISSN:0270-6474
1529-2401
DOI:10.1523/jneurosci.4161-13.2014