Facilitation by Irrelevant Distractors Under High Perceptual Load: Suppression or Controlled Attentional Capture?

Perceptual load theory (Forster & Lavie, 2008) is a key framework in visual attention research, demonstrating that under high-load conditions, fully irrelevant distractors are no longer processed and do not disrupt task performance. In our recent work (Manini et al., 2025), we replicated this effect. However, we also found that under high load, the distractor not only failed to impair performance but actually led to faster reaction times (RTs) in distractor-present trials. In the broader attentional capture literature, this reversed effect is typically considered to reflect distractor suppression. However, in the perceptual load task, where the distractor is placed outside the relevant search array, suppression should not logically lead to faster responses. Furthermore, the faster responses were accompanied by increased error rates, leading us to hypothesize that this reversed effect reflects spatially controlled attentional capture rather than distractor suppression. Specifically, the distractor may alert the attentional system, accelerating responses, while attention moving to its position remains somehow controlled, as the distractor is never the target. To test this hypothesis, we first analyzed the consistency of this effect across all available open-data resources using the Forster and Lavie (2008) task. We then reanalyzed the same data, incorporating the spatial proximity between target and distractor, observing that trials with the distractor near the target strongly drove the reversed RT effect, while trials with the distractor far from the target led to increased error rates. These findings challenge the idea that high perceptual load prevents attentional capture by irrelevant stimuli. Moreover, they suggest that faster RTs in distractor-present conditions do not necessarily indicate distractor suppression, as commonly assumed in attentional capture research, giving new insight into the interpretation of this reversed effect.