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Citation |
Won BY, Geng JJ. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 2018; 44(7): 1128-1141. |
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Affiliation |
Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis. |
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Copyright |
(Copyright © 2018, American Psychological Association) |
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DOI |
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PMID |
29733673 |
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Abstract |
Visual search for a target object occurs rapidly if there were no distractors to compete for attention, but this rarely happens in real-world environments. Distractors are almost always present and must be suppressed for target selection to succeed. Previous research suggests that one way this occurs is through the creation of a stimulus-specific distractor template. However, it remains unknown how information within such templates scale up with multiple distractors. Here we investigated the informational content of distractor templates created from repeated exposures to multiple distractors. We investigated this question using a visual search task in which participants searched for a gray square among colored squares. During "training," participants always saw the same set of colored distractors. During "testing," new distractor sets were interleaved with the trained distractors. The critical manipulation in each study was the distance (in color space) of the new test distractors from the trained distractors. We hypothesized that the pattern of distractor interference during testing would reveal the tuning of the suppression template: RTs should be commensurate with the degree to which distractor colors are encoded within the suppression template. Language: en |