Dimensional constraints on distractor handling in visual search

Abstract
Salient-but-irrelevant objects have the potential to distract attention and interfere with the task of searching for relevant objects. A very potent mechanism for reducing this interference, the (top-down) modulation of the distractor’s (bottom-up) saliency signal, is suggested by the dimension-weighting account. Various strands of psychophysical and electrophysiological evidence indicate that people can very effectively down-weight a whole distractor dimension, but not a specific distractor feature when using a priority map to guide attention.
These data patterns are well accounted for by a dimension-weighting-based computational model of priority computations that assumes a partial (though not perfect) down-weighting of the distractor whenever target and distractor stand out in different dimensions.