The Characteristics of Distractor Templates Arising from Learned Suppression

In visual search, individuals use cognitive representations known as distractor templates to filter out irrelevant distractors and focus on relevant targets. While previous research has predominantly focused on target templates, this study aims to investigate the nature of distractor templates. Specifically, we investigate the type of information—whether perceptual, semantic, or a combination of both—that is derived from the repeated suppression of distractors. During the training phase, participants sought a target object from a specific category (e.g., shoe) among other distractor objects from a different category (e.g., broom). Following the training phase, without explicit transitions, four different types of distractors were introduced: 1) new exemplars of trained distractors (e.g., a new broom), 2) semantically related distractors (e.g., bucket), 3) perceptually related distractors (e.g., spatula), and 4) unrelated distractors (e.g., light bulb). We hypothesized that if the distractor template included perceptual information but not semantic information, perceptually similar distractors (e.g., spatula) would be suppressed more effectively than semantically related (e.g., bucket) or unrelated distractors (e.g., light bulb), resulting in faster search. Conversely, if the distractor template contained semantic information, semantically related distractors (e.g., bucket) would be suppressed more efficiently than perceptually related (e.g., spatula) or unrelated distractors (e.g., bucket), leading to faster search. If the distractor template encompassed both semantic and perceptual information, both semantically related (e.g., bucket) and perceptually related (e.g., spatula) distractors would exhibit faster search than unrelated distractors (e.g., light bulb). We found that the distractor template formed through repeated exposures contains both semantic and perceptual information to some extent. It is noteworthy that our distractor processes extend beyond mere feature-based information, incorporating semantic details of distractors encountered repeatedly. These novel findings highlight how attentional guidance during visual search tasks is influenced not only by feature-based but also semantic-based processes.