Cueing distractors is effective when the incentive to suppress is high.

Avoiding distraction is critical for our ability to focus, and recent years have seen an increased interest in attentional suppression mechanisms. We now know that we implicitly learn about statistical regularities of our environment, which facilitates inhibition, but it remains unclear if distractors can also be suppressed voluntarily when advance information about their occurrence becomes available. Reasoning that such top-down suppression is likely an effortful process requiring a certain degree of motivation, we aimed to show that distractor cueing can effectively reduce distraction when the incentive is high. In an additional singleton search task, we maximized the incentive to suppress by presenting cues that validly indicated the distractor's specific location and colour, and by rewarding successful suppression. For correct responses, participants received either a low or high reward, depending on distractor colour. Responses were faster in trials with predictive cues than in trials with cues that did not provide any information. These cueing benefits increased over the course of the experiment. Reward magnitude also affected reaction times, indicating that high-reward singletons were more distracting, but did not interact with cueing condition. This performance pattern was complemented by modulations of the P