Attenuating the 'attentional white bear' effect enhances suppressive attention.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Attention

Background:

• The attentional white bear (AWB) effect describes how trying to ignore an object can paradoxically increase attention towards it.
• The underlying neural and cognitive mechanisms of the AWB effect are not fully understood.
• Two proposed mechanisms include reactive 'search and destroy' suppression and failed proactive suppression.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the mechanisms responsible for the attentional white bear (AWB) effect.
• To differentiate between reactive and proactive distractor suppression as causes of the AWB effect.
• To address limitations of previous studies on the AWB effect.

Main Methods:

• Developed a novel categorical visual search task using naturalistic stimuli.
• Conducted five experiments with a total of 96 participants.
• Participants searched displays where only distractor categories were cued, with unknown targets.

Main Results:

• Confirmed the occurrence of the attentional white bear (AWB) effect in the visual search task.
• Attenuated the AWB effect by introducing a pre-search stimulus.
• The pre-search stimulus likely disrupted distractor templates held in working memory.

Conclusions:

• The attentional white bear (AWB) effect arises from a failure in proactive distractor suppression.
• The findings do not support a 'search and destroy' reactive suppression mechanism for the AWB effect.
• Proactive suppression failure leads to an attentional bias towards ignored items.