P<sub>D</sub> components and distractor inhibition in visual search: New evidence for the signal suppression hypothesis
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The hypothesis that salient distractors in visual search are actively suppressed is supported by the fact that these objects elicit P D components believed to be associated with inhibition. This account was challenged by researchers who found that a P D to lateral color singleton distractors was followed by a contralateral negativity, which they interpreted as an N2pc indicative of attentional capture. As this would be at odds with successful distractor suppression, they proposed an alternative lateral‐first serial scanning hypothesis, which assumes that the P D might actually be an N2pc elicited when a lateral context item is selected. We tested this hypothesis by measuring lateralized ERP components to search displays with two lateral and two vertical midline items, including a color singleton and a shape‐defined target. Color singletons triggered P D components not only in blocks where attention was unfocused because target location was unpredictable, but critically also in blocks where targets only appeared on the midline and participants had no reason to attend to lateral items. This is inconsistent with the serial scanning hypothesis and supports the idea that the P D reflects signal suppression. P D components to singleton distractors were followed by a contralateral negativity, which we interpreted as a second P D elicited by nonsalient distractors on the opposite side. Our sequential inhibition account reconciles conflicting results of recent studies and emphasizes the role of inhibitory processes during attentional target selection in visual search.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it