Salient distractors produce fewer eye movements when targets are absent in visual search

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Decades of research have demonstrated that salient distractors can capture attention and delay target acquisition. What effect does a salient distractor have when targets are sometimes absent? In Moher (2020), we found that in these types of visual searches, salient distractors cause observers to quit their search earlier than they otherwise would. As a result of this distractor-induced early quitting, targets are more likely to be missed. In a new pre-registered study, we examined eye movements in a simple visual search task to determine how distractors produce early quitting. In addition to replicating the behavioral results from Moher (2020), we found that when distractors were present, fewer eye movements occurred before target absent responses, and less of the display area was searched. These results suggest that at least part of the distractor-induced early quitting effect is a result of participants searching the display less thoroughly when distractors are present. Surprisingly, there were very few eye movements to the salient distractor itself across all conditions suggesting that distractor suppression may be involved in distractor-induced early quitting. Finally, salient distractors produced an increase in both search errors, in which the target was never fixated, and decision errors, in which the target was fixated but the participant failed to recognize it as a target. These findings demonstrate that salient distractors cause early quitting in visual search by reducing the amount of information that observers extract from the search image. Increases in decision errors, combined with below baseline fixations on the distractor itself, suggest that cognitive load associated with distractor suppression may also increase misses when distractors are present. These results have implications not only for understanding how distractors impact attention, but also for applied fields where visual search occurs in the presence of sometimes salient distractors, such as medical image screening.

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