ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance2019
The attentional template is shifted and asymmetrically sharpened by distractor context.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed.
- Attentional tuning to color in efficient visual search: Evidence for optimal peak shifts and relational asymmetry.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- Learning-dependent modulation of working memory.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Efficient measurement of dynamic working memory.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Electrophysiological evidence for the optimal tuning of attention.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Top-down instructions influence the attentional weight on color and shape dimensions during bidimensional search.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Representational structures as a unifying framework for attention.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2024Review
- Task-adaptive changes to the target template in response to distractor context: Separability versus similarity.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2024Article
- Bend but don't break: Prioritization protects working memory from displacement but leaves it vulnerable to distortion from distraction.Cognition · 2023Article
- Expected distractor context biases the attentional template for target shapes.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2023Article
- Adaptive visual selection in feature space.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Article
- Feature-based attention warps the perception of visual features.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Learned feature regularities enable suppression of spatially overlapping stimuli.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- Investigating attentional control sets: Evidence for the compilation of multi-feature control sets.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- Differential modulation of visual responses by distractor or target expectations.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- Target templates and the time course of distractor location learning.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Contextual and Temporal Constraints for Attentional Capture: Commentary on Theeuwes' 2023 Review "The Attentional Capture Debate: When Can We Avoid Salient Distractors and when Not?"Journal of cognition · 2023Article
- Long-term memory interference is resolved via repulsion and precision along diagnostic memory dimensions.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Article
- Temporal integration of feature probability distributions.Psychological research · 2022Article
- Benefits from negative templates in easy and difficult search depend on rapid distractor rejection and enhanced guidance.Vision research · 2022Article
- Feature similarity is non-linearly related to attentional selection: Evidence from visual search and sustained attention tasks.Journal of vision · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Theories of attention hypothesize the existence of an "attentional template" that contains target features in working or long-term memory. It is often assumed that the template contents are veridical, but recent studies have found that this is not true when the distractor set is linearly separable from the target (e.g., all distractors are "yellower" than an orange-colored target). In such cases, the target representation in memory shifts away from distractor features (Navalpakkam & Itti, 2007) and develops a sharper boundary with distractors (Geng, DiQuattro, & Helm, 2017). These changes in the target template are presumed to increase the target-to-distractor psychological distinctiveness and lead to better attentional selection, but it remains unclear what characteristics of the distractor context produce shifting versus sharpening. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the template representation shifts whenever the distractor set (i.e., all of the distractors) is linearly separable from the target but asymmetrical sharpening occurs only when linearly separable distractors are highly target-similar. Our results were consistent, suggesting that template shifting and asymmetrical sharpening are 2 mechanisms that increase the representational distinctiveness of targets from expected distractors and improve visual search performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.