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Adaptability and specificity of inhibition processes in distractor‐induced blindness

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Psychophysiology

Published online on

Abstract

In a rapid serial visual presentation task, inhibition processes cumulatively impair processing of a target possessing distractor properties. This phenomenon—known as distractor‐induced blindness—has thus far only been elicited using dynamic visual features, such as motion and orientation changes. In three ERP experiments, we used a visual object feature—color—to test for the adaptability and specificity of the effect. In Experiment I, participants responded to a color change (target) in the periphery whose onset was signaled by a central cue. Presentation of irrelevant color changes prior to the cue (distractors) led to reduced target detection, accompanied by a frontal ERP negativity that increased with increasing number of distractors, similar to the effects previously found for dynamic targets. This suggests that distractor‐induced blindness is adaptable to color features. In Experiment II, the target consisted of coherent motion contrasting the color distractors. Correlates of distractor‐induced blindness were found neither in the behavioral nor in the ERP data, indicating a feature specificity of the process. Experiment III confirmed the strict distinction between congruent and incongruent distractors: A single color distractor was embedded in a stream of motion distractors with the target consisting of a coherent motion. While behavioral performance was affected by the distractors, the color distractor did not elicit a frontal negativity. The experiments show that distractor‐induced blindness is also triggered by visual stimuli predominantly processed in the ventral stream. The strict specificity of the central inhibition process also applies to these stimulus features.