The Active Suppression of a Distractor’s Location Can Be Elusive
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our visual system is inundated with distracting objects that vie for our attention. While visual attention selects relevant information, inhibitory mechanisms might be useful to suppress the locations occupied by irrelevant distractors. Yet, there is a dearth of behavioral evidence for the active suppression of a distractor's location (ASDL) using central cues that provide preliminary information about a distractor's location. In the first two experiments, we attempt to conceptually replicate, using an online platform, experiments that provide evidence of the ASDL. We replicate the distractor cueing effect in a localization task (Experiment 1) wherein responses to targets were faster when a central arrow cued the location of an impending distractor than an empty location. This effect was larger in the first block of trials than it was in the second. In a discrimination task (Experiment 2), unlike previous studies, we found no evidence for an effect of distractor cueing. In Experiment 3, we replaced the central arrow cues with central number cues because arrow cues may elicit a symbolic shift of attention that might offset the ASDL. Once again, the best model was one in which the distractor cueing effect was absent. We replicate these failures to find evidence of the ASDL in two more experiments. The results suggest that the ASDL can be elusive and may be tied to the response system, not attention.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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