Eye movements reveal the contributions of early and late processes of enhancement and suppression to the guidance of visual search

In visual search attention can be directed towards items matching top-down goals, but this must compete with factors such as salience that can capture attention. However, under some circumstances it appears that attention can avoid known distractor features. Chang and Egeth (Psychological Science, 30 (12), 1724–1732, 2019) found that such inhibitory effects reflect a combination of distractor-feature suppression and target-feature enhancement. In the present study (N = 48), we extend these findings by revealing that suppression and enhancement effects guide overt attention. On search trials (75% of trials) participants searched for a diamond shape among several other shapes. On half of the search trials all objects were the same colour (e.g., green) and on the other half of the search trials one of the non-target shapes appeared in a different colour (e.g., red). On interleaved probe trials (25% of trials), subjects were presented with four ovals. One of the ovals was in either the colour of the target or the colour of the distractor from the search trials. The other three ovals were on neutral colours. Critically, we found that attention was overtly captured by target colours and avoided distractor colours when they were viewed in a background of neutral colours. In addition, we provided a time course of attentional control. Within visual search tasks we observed inhibition aiding early attentional effects, indexed by the time it took gaze to first reach the target, as well as later decision-making processes indexed by the time for a decision to be made once the target as found.