Can the location negative priming process operate in a proactive manner?

The Active Suppression of a Distractor's Location Can Be Elusive

Our visual system is inundated with distracting objects that vie for our attention. While visual attention selects relevant information, inhibitory mechanisms might be useful to suppress the locations occupied by irrelevant distractors. Yet, there is a dearth of behavioral evidence for the active suppression of a distractor's location (ASDL) using central cues that provide preliminary information about a distractor's location. In the first two experiments, we attempt to conceptually replicate, using an online platform, experiments that provide evidence of the ASDL. We replicate the distractor cueing effect in a localization task (Experiment 1) wherein responses to targets were faster when a central arrow cued the location of an impending distractor than an empty location. This effect was larger in the first block of trials than it was in the second. In a discrimination task (Experiment 2), unlike previous studies, we found no evidence for an effect of distractor cueing. In Experiment 3, we replaced the central arrow cues with central number cues because arrow cues may elicit a symbolic shift of attention that might offset the ASDL. Once again, the best model was one in which the distractor cueing effect was absent. We replicate these failures to find evidence of the ASDL in two more experiments. The results suggest that the ASDL can be elusive and may be tied to the response system, not attention.

Distract yourself: prediction of salient distractors by own actions and external cues

Distracting sensory events can capture attention, interfering with the performance of the task at hand. We asked: is our attention captured by such events if we cause them ourselves? To examine this, we employed a visual search task with an additional salient singleton distractor, where the distractor was predictable either by the participant’s own (motor) action or by an endogenous cue; accordingly, the task was designed to isolate the influence of motor and non-motor predictive processes. We found both types of prediction, cue- and action-based, to attenuate the interference of the distractor—which is at odds with the “attentional white bear” hypothesis, which states that prediction of distracting stimuli mandatorily directs attention towards them. Further, there was no difference between the two types of prediction. We suggest this pattern of results may be better explained by theories postulating general predictive mechanisms, such as the framework of predictive processing, as compared to accounts proposing a special role of action–effect prediction, such as theories based on optimal motor control. However, rather than permitting a definitive decision between competing theories, our study highlights a number of open questions, to be answered by these theories, with regard to how exogenous attention is influenced by predictions deriving from the environment versus our own actions.

White bear everywhere: exploring the boundaries of the attentional white bear phenomenon

Some failures of selective attention may be explained by the attentional white bear (AWB) phenomenon Tsal & Makovski (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 32:351-363, 2006), which indicates that prior knowledge of a distractor location causes attention to be actively allocated to it. The AWB effect is demonstrated in a task that includes infrequent trials that involve two simultaneous dots embedded among flanker trials. The dot positioned at an expected distractor location is perceived as appearing before the dot at an expected empty location, indicating that attentional resources have initially been allocated to the expected distractor locations. The main goal of this study was to explore the boundaries of the AWB phenomenon by imposing perceptual, memory, and sensory constraints on the flanker task. The results showed that the AWB effect was obtained even when additional constraints severely taxed the information-processing system. We propose that a mandatory mechanism guides a fixed minimal amount of attention to expected distractor locations in a top-down manner.

Prime-trial processing demands and their impact on distractor processing in a spatial negative priming task

A spatial negative priming (NP) paradigm was used where trials were presented in pairs, first the 'prime' and then the 'probe', and where participants responded manually to a target's location. In Experiment 1, three prime-trial types were used: distractor-plus-target, predictable distractor-only, and unpredictable distractor-only, with prime-probe trial onset delays of 2, 5 or 10 s (NP longevity). In Experiment 2, the latter two prime-trials were employed with onset delays of 75 and 750 ms (distractor response activation-inhibition sequence). With the exception of the 10 s onset delay, the spatial NP effect data (NP size, longevity, distractor response activation-inhibition sequence) was the same for all three prime-trial types. Thus, the varying processing demands associated with each of the prime-trial types (e.g., selection, intervening response) did not alter prime distractor processing so that they differentially contributed to the spatial NP process. The three prime-trial types can be used interchangeably, within limits, to study the NP process.