Research suggests that although target amplification acts as the main determinant of the efficacy of selective attention, distractor inhibition contributes under some circumstances. Here we aimed to gain insight into the operating principles that regulate the use of distractor inhibition during selective attention. The results suggest that, in…

Control adjustments are necessary to balance competing cognitive demands. One task that is well-suited to explore control adjustments is the stop-signal paradigm, in which subjects must balance initiation and inhibition. One common adjustment in the stop-signal paradigm is post-stop-signal slowing. Existing models of sequential adjustments in the…

The forcefulness of key press responses was measured in stop-all and selective stopping versions of the stop-signal paradigm. When stop signals were presented too late for participants to succeed in stopping their responses, response force was nonetheless reduced relative to trials in which no stop signal was presented. This effect shows that…

Covert attention is tightly coupled with the control of eye movements, but there is controversy about how tight this coupling is. The premotor theory of attention proposes that activation of the eye movement system is necessary to produce shifts of attention. In this study, we experimentally prevented healthy participants from planning or…

Binary-choice reactions are typically faster when the stimulus location corresponds with that of the response than when it does not. This advantage of spatial correspondence is known as the "stimulus-response compatibility" (SRC) effect when the mapping of stimulus location, as the relevant stimulus dimension, is varied to be compatible or…

When participants repeat the same task in a context in which the task may also switch (a mixed block), performance deteriorates compared to when there is only one task repeating (a pure block). Three experiments were designed to assess how perceptual and motor transitions influenced this mixing cost. Experiment 1 provided three pure block…

Theories of cognitive control generally assume that perceived conflict acts as a signal to engage inhibitory mechanisms that suppress subsequent conflicting information. Crucially, an absence of conflict is not regarded as being a relevant signal for cognitive control. Using a cueing, a priming, and a Simon task, we provide evidence that conflict…

Recent research on eye movements during scene viewing has primarily focused on where the eyes fixate. But eye fixations also differ in their durations. Here we investigated whether fixation durations in scene viewing are under the direct and immediate control of the current visual input. Subjects freely viewed photographs of scenes in preparation…

Object-substitution masking (OSM) occurs when a mask, such as four dots that surround a brief target item, onsets simultaneously with the target and offsets a short time after the target, rather than simultaneously with it. OSM is a reduction in accuracy of reporting the target with the temporally trailing mask, compared with the simultaneously…

Affective evaluations of previously ignored visual stimuli are more negative than those of novel items or prior targets of attention or response. This has been taken as evidence that inhibition has negative affective consequences. But inhibition could act instead to attenuate or "neutralize" preexisting affective salience, predicting opposite…

Responses are slower to targets appearing in recently inspected locations, an effect known as Inhibition of Return (IOR). IOR is typically viewed as the consequence of an involuntary mechanism that prevents reinspection of previously visited locations and thereby biases attention toward novel locations during visual search. For an inhibitory…

Research on the topic of distractor inhibition has used different empirical approaches to study how the human mind selects relevant information from the environment, and the results are controversially discussed. One key question that typically arises is how selection deals with the irrelevant information. We used a new selection task, in which…

To what degree does our representation of the immediate world depend solely on its relevance to what we are currently doing? We examined whether relevance per se can cause "blindness," even when there is no resource limitation. In a novel paradigm, people looked at a colored circle surrounded by a differently colored ring--the task…

In four experiments we assessed whether visual working memory (VWM) maintains a record of previously processed visual information, allowing old information to be inhibited, and new information to be prioritized. Specifically, we evaluated whether VWM contributes to the inhibition (i.e., visual marking) of previewed distractors in a preview search.…

Effective motor control involves both the execution of appropriate responses and the inhibition of inappropriate responses that are evoked by response-associated stimuli. The inhibition of a motor response has traditionally been characterized as either a voluntary act of cognitive control or a low-level perceptual bias arising from processes such…