# Can location cues facilitate attentional suppression?

## TL;DR

This study investigates whether location cues can help suppress attention to distracting stimuli, but finds no evidence that such cues enhance suppression.

## Contribution

The study provides new empirical evidence challenging the idea that spatial cues can proactively suppress attention.

## Key findings

- Across three experiments with 554 participants, no evidence was found for cueing-enhanced attentional suppression.
- In some experiments, informative cues slightly slowed responses, suggesting attention was captured by the cues.
- Participants did not learn the association between cues and distractor locations.

## Abstract

The spatial cueing paradigm has illustrated that location cues result in attentional enhancement of target stimuli. However, evidence is mixed on whether proactive attentional suppression can be cued similarly. In this registered report, we used a hybrid flanker-visual search-spatial cueing paradigm in which participants were presented with informative or non-informative cues regarding the upcoming location of a target feature matching a distractor in the search array. We aimed to replicate and extend a previous study which found evidence that cues support attentional suppression. We repeated the experiment with informative and non-informative cue conditions blocked (Experiment 2) and with possible target and distractor locations separated (Experiment 3). Across all three experiments (total n = 554), we did not observe any evidence of cueing-enhanced attentional suppression. In Experiments 1 and 3, participant responses were slightly slower in the informative cue condition, suggesting that the cue itself captured attention when the cue type was interleaved and thus unpredictable trial-to-trial. Surprisingly, post-experiment assessment of distractor learning suggested participants had not learnt the association between cue and distractor location in any experiment. These findings do not support spatial cue-enhanced attentional suppression.