ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2023
The role of salience in the suppression of distracting stimuli.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Distractor avoidance is achieved by active control rather than passive exclusion.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- 35+ years of the additional singleton task: Design features and guidelines.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Review
- Signal suppression makes search less effortful.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Rapid Inversion of Singleton Distractor Representations Underlies Learned Attentional Suppression.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Learning alters salience and proactive attentional priority.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Rapid inversion of singleton distractor representations underlies learned attentional suppression.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Signal suppression 2.0: An updated account of attentional capture and suppression.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Restoring a top-down control assumption: Salience effects in working memory are overcome with time.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- Are abrupt onsets highly salient?Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2025Article
- Attentional capture by abrupt onsets: Foundations and emerging issues.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2025Review
- The temporal dynamics of visual attention.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- Diverse neuronal activity patterns contribute to the control of distraction in the prefrontal and parietal cortex.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- How Does Mind-Wandering Affect Distractor Suppression?Visual cognition · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Researchers have long debated whether salient distractors have the power to automatically capture attention. Recent research has suggested a potential resolution, called the signal suppression hypothesis, whereby salient distractors produce a bottom-up salience signal, but can be suppressed to prevent visual distraction. This account, however, has been criticized on the grounds that previous studies may have used distractors that were only weakly salient. This claim has been difficult to empirically test because there are currently no well-established measures of salience. The current study addresses this by introducing a psychophysical technique to measure salience. First, we generated displays that aimed to manipulate the salience of two color singletons via color contrast. We then verified that this manipulation was successful using a psychophysical technique to determine the minimum exposure duration required to detect each color singleton. The key finding was that high-contrast singletons were detected at briefer exposure thresholds than low-contrast singletons, suggesting that high-contrast singletons were more salient. Next, we evaluated the participants' ability to ignore these singletons in a task in which they were task irrelevant. The results showed that, if anything, high-salience singletons were more strongly suppressed than low-salience singletons. These results generally support the signal suppression hypothesis and refute claims that highly salient singletons cannot be ignored.
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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.