Abstract
During attention, target and distractor locations compete for selection. It is unclear how facilitation and suppression interact during covert and overt shifts of attention as most studies have focused on covert shifts of attention. In a recent countermanding task, it was shown that compared to covert attention, there was greater suppression at distractor locations in an overt attention paradigm, while target facilitation didn’t differ. However, it is unknown if this finding can be extended to cases where target is selected without countermanding. Here we examine how suppression at distractor locations interact with target selection in overt and covert attention (saccade and fixation conditions). To do so, we adapted Gaspelin and Luck (2018)’s attention capture task, where target selection was primed with line discrimination trials, while distractor suppression was probed with letters identification trials within the same block. Participants also performed baseline letter identification trials where attention was not allocated to one specific location. We tested 15 participants (M = 24 y, SD = 6 y) and examined how letter identification performance at distractor locations was affected by attention condition (overt/pre-saccadic vs. covert/fixation). For both conditions, letter identification at distractor locations was worse than that during the baseline condition (p < .001). Letter identification was worse during saccade trials compared to fixation trials (p = .003), while it was equally excellent at target locations. Further, letter identification at the distractor location tended to be worse when distractors were located in the same hemifield and when they were further from the target (p = .008). Taken together, these results showed that attention preceding saccade execution suppressed distractor locations to a larger extent than covert attention, and this effect was modulated by both distance from target and the hemifield in which the target and distractors were presented.