title: Suppression of salient objects prevents distraction in visual search.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, V5A 1S6 Canada.
authors.forename: John M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Gaspar
authors.forename: John J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: McDonald
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D003163:Competitive Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D005133:Eye Movements; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009778:Occipital Lobe / Q000503:physiopathology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: EEG; ERP; attention; distraction; suppression; visual search
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