Isaac Savelson¹, Andrew B. Leber¹; ¹The Ohio State University

Everyday life demands that we minimize distraction by irrelevant visual information. Fortunately, humans have a robust ability to ignore distracting stimuli through repeated experience with the distractor’s properties. Originally, distractor ignoring was thought to rely on suppression of specific features carried by the distractor. However, recent work has revealed that suppression sometimes generalizes to never before seen features. At present, little work has been done to investigate how feature-general suppression compares to its feature-specific counterpart. Here, we set out to investigate how feature-general suppression is achieved. Is it a complete suppression of all color-space or merely a special case of feature-specific suppression? To answer this, we first needed to establish a more robust method of testing feature-specific and general suppression strategies. We accomplished this using a probe procedure where we presented select distractor colors during a visual search task while, in a probe task, we compared attentional prioritization of these distractor colors to that of test colors that were never presented as distractors. Prioritization of test colors was greater than distractor colors when we presented a single fixed distractor color in search, but not when we randomly varied the distractor among multiple colors. With this new design, we tested our original question about feature-general suppression by presenting a range of test colors varying in color-space distance from the distractor color(s). Overall, distractor colors were prioritized less than test colors but a greater difference was found when a single fixed distractor was presented compared to multiple colors. This pattern suggests that when variable distractors are presented in search, participants do not automatically suppress all salient color singletons; instead, they accumulate suppression in a feature-specific manner. However, this suppression can partly generalize across color space when variable distractor features appear during search.

Acknowledgements: Funding: NSF BCS-2021038 to ABL