In a variety of conflict paradigms, target and distractor stimuli are defined in terms of perceptual features. Interference evoked by distractor stimuli tends to be reduced when the ratio of congruent to incongruent trials is decreased, suggesting conflict-induced perceptual filtering (i.e., adjusting the processing weights assigned to stimuli…

Participants saw a small number of objects in a visual display and performed a visual detection or visual-discrimination task in the context of task-irrelevant spoken distractors. In each experiment, a visual cue was presented 400 ms after the onset of a spoken word. In experiments 1 and 2, the cue was an isoluminant color change and participants…

Four experiments are described in which 1 visual object (the target) was selected from another (the distractor) according to its color (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) or its relative location (Experiment 3) and then was classified according to a simple geometric property. Object classification was signaled as fast as possible by a precision or power…

In a previous study, it was shown that the attentional blink (AB)--the failure to recall the 2nd of 2 visual targets (T1 and T2) presented within 500 ms in rapid serial visual presentation--is reduced when T2 is preceded by a distractor that shares a feature with T2 (e.g., color; Nieuwenstein, Chun, van der Lubbe & Hooge, 2005). Here, this cuing…

Nine experiments show that in the context of Stroop dilution the extent to which flanking distractors are processed depends on the nature of the material at fixation. A Stroop effect is eliminated if a word or a nonword is colored and appears at fixation and the color word appears as a flanker. A Stroop effect is observed when the color carrier at…