Salient distractors are rapidly rejected during inefficient visual search

To navigate the ever-changing and information-overladen environment it is crucial to selectively process relevant information and ignore distraction. Recently, the salient-signal-suppression hypothesis has stimulated much research and theoretical debates in attention research. It claims that – under certain conditions – salient distractors are suppressed at the search-guiding priority map and therefore speed-up search as compared to neutral (non-suppressed) non-targets. An alternative interpretation claims that these salient distractors are simply ignored. Using a novel paradigm to control search order and measure search speed, we here provide evidence that this speed-up is neither due to suppression on the priority map nor simple ignoring, but instead due to speeded processing and rejection of the salient distractor relative to each non-target. In particular, we show that the speed-up occurs only when the distractor is processed before the target and that distractor processing takes less time than processing a non-target. These findings not only call into question the predominant explanations of the distractor-speed-up effect and thereby shed new light on the attentional-capture debate, but also provide striking evidence that not all searches are guided by the priority map.