Top-Down Inhibitory Control of Singleton Distractors: Distractor Type and Time Course

Attentional capture by irrelevant distractors can impede people’s performance, making the cognitive control of attentional capture an important mechanism. The methodology applied in previous studies provided participants with foreknowledge of the upcoming distractor to investigate the top-down inhibitory control mechanism. However, these findings are mixed. This study further examined whether precueing the spatial location of the color-singleton or onset-singleton distractors in the upcoming search array can reduce related interference. Experiments 1A and 2A demonstrated the benefit of precueing the spatial location of the color-singleton distractors. Contrastingly, the overall performance of Experiments 1B, 1C, and 2B did not reveal a benefit of precueing when onset-singleton distractors were presented. In addition, analyses of vincentized cumulative reaction time distributions, the spatial distribution of the suppression effect in each experiment, and memory probes in Experiments 2A and 2B suggest that the effects of distractor precueing may involve the coordination of proactive and reactive control mechanisms.