Saliency-Specific Mechanism of Distractor Suppression
Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, VU Amsterdam2020
- Background: Research has shown that interference caused by a salient distractor in visual search tasks can be reduced by suppressing the high-probability location (HPL) of the distractor through implicit learning, while the underlying neural mechanisms and the impact of distractor saliency on suppression effects remain unclear.
- Designed and programmed experiments, collected and analyzed data with MATLAB, and wrote the paper (published on Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics).
- Developed a novel paradigm to manipulate saliency of distractors in additional singleton task and examined how distractors of different saliency were suppressed at the same HPL.
- Inferred the neural mechanisms underlying the saliency-specific mechanism: Spatial probability manipulation elicited attentional modulation of V1 cells that cover the HPL with their classical receptive fields. The attentional modulation is tuned in accordance to the firing rates of the group of V1 cells representing the distractor, which is finally reflected on the saliency-specific reduction of interference when the distractor appears at the HPL.