Unpredictable singleton distractors in visual search can be subject to second-order suppression
Drisdelle, Zivony and Eimer note that earlier work suggested salient distractors can be suppressed only when their features are constant and predictable. Using a multiframe letter-probe paradigm, they found suppression when singleton colours were fixed but not when target and singleton colours were swapped, and the suppression reappeared when the target colour could take one of eight random colours. They conclude first-order suppression is not universal and that suppression appears even without targets, attributing this to target-singleton competition. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 87(3), 832-847, 2025.
Drisdelle, Zivony and Eimer note that earlier work suggested salient distractors can be suppressed only when their features are constant and predictable. Using a multiframe letter-probe paradigm, they found suppression when singleton colours were fixed but not when target and singleton colours were swapped, and the suppression reappeared when the target colour could take one of eight random colours. They conclude first-order suppression is not universal and that suppression appears even without targets, attributing this to target-singleton competition. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 87(3), 832-847, 2025.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex record, 2026-11-03.
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Perception, & Psychophysics, 87(3). doi:10.3758/s13414-025-03028-3. Read at the level of the abstract.