Salient Distractor Suppression

What it is

In visual search experiments, one item in a display is made different from the rest, often in colour. Such an item can draw attention. The question behind this concept is whether the system can learn to ignore it, and under what conditions. The authors note that earlier work suggested suppression of salient distractors was possible only when their features were constant and predictable.

In effect

Drisdelle, Zivony and Eimer used a multiframe letter-probe paradigm. They report suppression when singleton colours were fixed and no suppression when target and singleton colours were swapped. When the target colour could be any of eight random colours, the suppression effect reappeared. They conclude that first-order suppression is not universal, and that suppression effects appear even without targets, which they attribute to competition between target and singleton.

For a brand, the laboratory result offers a way to think about colour choice: an odd-coloured item can draw the eye, and it can be ignored more readily once its colour is predictable. In a category where most packs share one colour, that colour is no longer the odd one out.

What it does not say

The task used letters on a screen, and the result concerns colour in general. It says nothing specific to yellow, and it was not run on shelves, packs or advertisements. Moving from a display to a shelf is an extrapolation that would need its own test.

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