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Luck et al. (2021) reviewed evidence that observers can learn to suppress attentional capture by salient distractors. Several commentaries were written in response to this review paper, many of which raised important and interesting issues. Here, we respond to these commentaries. Although there has been substantial progress in the attentional capture debate, there are still remaining issues that need to be addressed before the debate is completely resolved. Specifically, we summarize the need for an independent measure of bottom-up salience and better metrics of how attentional control unfolds over time. Ultimately, the field may need a more refined theoretical model of visual attention that distinguishes between attentional priority, attentional orienting, and attentional engagement.

For over 25 years, researchers have debated whether physically salient stimuli capture attention in an automatic manner, independent of the observer's goals, or whether the capture of attention depends on the match between a stimulus and the observer's task set. Recent evidence suggests an intermediate position in which salient stimuli automatically produce a priority signal, but the capture of attention can be prevented via an inhibitory mechanism that suppresses the salient stimulus. Here, proponents from multiple sides of the debate describe how their original views have changed in light of recent research, as well as remaining areas of disagreement. These perspectives highlight some emerging areas of consensus and provide new directions for future research on attentional capture.

Attention is a limited resource that must be carefully controlled to prevent distraction. Much research has demonstrated that distraction can be prevented by proactively suppressing salient stimuli to prevent them from capturing attention. It has been suggested, however, that prior studies showing evidence of suppression may have used stimuli that were not truly salient. This claim has been difficult to test because there are currently no agreed-upon methods to demonstrate that an object is salient. The current study aims to help resolve this by introducing a new technique to test the role of salience in attentional capture. Low- and high-salience singletons were generated via a manipulation of color contrast. An initial experiment then verified the manipulation of salience using a search task where the color singleton was the target and could only be found via its bottom–up popout. High-salience singletons were found much more easily than low-salience singletons, suggesting that salience powerfully influenced attention when task relevant. A following experiment then used the same stimulus displays but adapted the task so that the singletons were task-irrelevant distractors. Both low- and high-salience singletons were suppressed, suggesting neither was able to capture attention. These results challenge purely stimulus-driven accounts by showing that improving salience only enhances attentional allocation in situations where the object is also task relevant. The results are instead consistent with the signal suppression hypothesis, which predicts that task-irrelevant singletons can be suppressed. Public Significance Statement: Salient stimuli, such as brightly colored objects, are often used to attract attention in everyday life. The current study aimed to understand how salience influences attentional allocation. We found that improving the salience of a stimulus can improve its ability to attract attention, but only when the object is made relevant to the task being performed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do salient distractors have the power to automatically capture attention? This question has led to a heated debate concerning the role of salience in attentional control. A potential resolution, called the signal suppression hypothesis, has proposed that salient items produce a bottom-up signal that vies for attention, but that salient stimuli can be suppressed via top-down control to prevent the capture of attention. This hypothesis, however, has been criticized on the grounds that the distractors used in initial studies of support were weakly salient. It has been difficult to know how seriously to take this low-salience criticism because assertions about high and low salience were made in the absence of a common (or any) measure of salience. The current study used a recently developed psychophysical technique to compare the salience of distractors from two previous studies at the center of this debate. Surprisingly, we found that the original stimuli criticized as having low salience were, if anything, more salient than stimuli from the later studies that purported to increase salience. Follow-up experiments determined exactly why the original stimuli were more salient and tested whether further improving salience could cause attentional capture as predicted by the low-salience account. Ultimately, these findings challenge purely stimulus-driven accounts of attentional control. Public Significance Statement: This study aimed to understand whether highly salient stimuli have the power to automatically attract attention. Using a new method to measure salience, we found evidence that is inconsistent with theoretical accounts claiming that stimuli of sufficient salience cannot be ignored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]