Unseeing the white bear: Negative search criteria guide visual attention through top-down suppression

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Top-down attentional control is crucial for efficient visual search.
• Negative search criteria, defining targets by what they are not, present a unique challenge for attentional guidance.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if negative search criteria can guide visual attention in a top-down manner.
• To explore the mechanism of feature-selective proactive suppression in visual search.

Main Methods:

• Three spatial cueing experiments were conducted.
• Participants searched for a target defined by a negative feature (e.g., red if the target was nonred).
• Peripheral singleton cues were presented at valid or invalid target locations.

Main Results:

• Slower reaction times were observed in valid trials only when singleton cues matched the negative feature.
• Suppression of cues matching the negative feature was stronger than ignoring irrelevant cues.
• Suppression effects were consistent across different cue-target intervals (60 ms and 150 ms).

Conclusions:

• Negative search criteria elicit feature-selective proactive suppression.
• This demonstrates top-down attentional suppression, parallel to goal-directed search.
• Provides evidence for attentional suppression as a task-dependent strategy.