Cueing distractors is effective when the incentive to suppress is high

TL;DR

People can better suppress distractions when they are highly motivated, as shown by improved reaction times and brain activity patterns.

Contribution

The study demonstrates that voluntary suppression of salient distractors is possible when advance cues and high incentives are provided.

Findings

Predictive cues significantly reduced distraction and improved response times.

High-reward distractors required more suppression, as indicated by PD amplitude modulations.

Cueing benefits increased over time, suggesting learning or adaptation.

Abstract

Avoiding distraction is critical for our ability to focus, and recent years have seen an increased interest in attentional suppression mechanisms. We now know that we implicitly learn about statistical regularities of our environment, which facilitates inhibition, but it remains unclear if distractors can also be suppressed voluntarily when advance information about their occurrence becomes available. Reasoning that such top-down suppression is likely an effortful process requiring a certain degree of motivation, we aimed to show that distractor cueing can effectively reduce distraction when the incentive is high. In an additional singleton search task, we maximized the incentive to suppress by presenting cues that validly indicated the distractor’s specific location and colour, and by rewarding successful suppression. For correct responses, participants received either a low or high reward, depending on distractor colour. Responses were faster in trials with predictive cues than in trials with cues that did not provide any information. These cueing benefits increased over the course of the experiment. Reward magnitude also affected reaction times, indicating that high-reward singletons were more distracting, but did not interact with cueing condition. This performance pattern was complemented by modulations of the PD, a lateralized event-related potential component reflecting active suppression: Smaller amplitudes, indicating that less suppression was required, were observed for low- versus high-reward distractors and, more importantly, for distractors following predictive versus nonpredictive cues. These findings provide proof-of-principle that salient distractors can be anticipatorily suppressed in a top-down manner and highlight the importance of motivation for this voluntary operation.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13414-025-03075-w.

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