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The role of salience in the suppression of distracting stimuli

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Abstract

Researchers have long debated whether salient distractors have the power to automatically capture attention. Recent research has suggested a potential resolution, called the signal suppression hypothesis, whereby salient distractors produce a bottom-up salience signal, but can be suppressed to prevent visual distraction. This account, however, has been criticized on the grounds that previous studies may have used distractors that were only weakly salient. This claim has been difficult to empirically test because there are currently no well-established measures of salience. The current study addresses this by introducing a psychophysical technique to measure salience. First, we generated displays that aimed to manipulate the salience of two color singletons via color contrast. We then verified that this manipulation was successful using a psychophysical technique to determine the minimum exposure duration required to detect each color singleton. The key finding was that high-contrast singletons were detected at briefer exposure thresholds than low-contrast singletons, suggesting that high-contrast singletons were more salient. Next, we evaluated the participants’ ability to ignore these singletons in a task in which they were task irrelevant. The results showed that, if anything, high-salience singletons were more strongly suppressed than low-salience singletons. These results generally support the signal suppression hypothesis and refute claims that highly salient singletons cannot be ignored.

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Notes

  1. Although we refer to the salience of a distractor, to state the obvious, this salience is with respect to the context provided by a display. For example, a red item might be salient in an otherwise all-blue display but might not be in an otherwise all-pink display.

  2. The floor effect problem refers to the inflation of the per-unit average derived for the nonsingleton distractor condition at higher set sizes. To calculate the per-item average, the total is divided by the number of nonsingleton distractors. Thus, increasing the number of nonsingleton distractors will artificially decrease the per-item average. This makes it difficult to observe suppression below the level of the nonsingleton distractor.

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Open practices statement

All data and stimulus presentation programs in this article are available via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/38md9/

Author note

This project was supported by the National Science Foundation Grant BCS-2045624 to N.G.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Binghamton, PO Box 6000, Binghamton, NY, 13902-6000, USA

    Brad T. Stilwell, Owen J. Adams & Nicholas Gaspelin

  2. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Howard E. Egeth

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  2. Owen J. Adams
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Correspondence to Brad T. Stilwell.

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Stilwell, B.T., Adams, O.J., Egeth, H.E. et al. The role of salience in the suppression of distracting stimuli. Psychon Bull Rev 30, 2262–2271 (2023). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02302-5

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