Visual Distraction’s “Silver Lining”: Distractor Suppression Boosts Attention to Competing Stimuli
通过五项实验（120名大学生），发现当目标与受抑制的干扰物属于同一感知组时，目标识别反而增强，表明抑制机制不仅降低干扰权重，还增强对相关刺激的反应。
Efficient search of the environment requires that people attend to the desired elements in a scene and ignore the undesired ones. Recent research has shown that this endeavor can benefit from the ability to proactively suppress distractors with known features, but little is known about the mechanisms that produce the suppression. We show here in five experiments ( N = 120 college students) that, surprisingly, identification of a sought-for target is enhanced when it is grouped with a suppressed distractor compared with when it is in a different perceptual group. The results show that the suppressive mechanism not only downweights undesired elements but also enhances responses to task-relevant elements in competition for attention with the distractor, fine tuning the suppression. The findings extend the understanding of how people efficiently process their visual world.