Whatever You Do, Don't Look at the . . .: Evaluating Guidance by an Exclusionary Attentional Template

People can use a target template consisting of one or more features to guide attention and gaze to matching objects in a search array. But can we also use feature information to guide attention away from known irrelevant items? Some studies found a benefit from foreknowledge of a distractor feature, whereas others found a cost. Importantly, previous work has largely relied on end-of-trial manual responses; it is unclear how feature-guided avoidance might unfold as candidate objects are inspected. In the current experiments, participants were cued with a distractor feature to avoid, then performed a visual search task while eye movements were recorded. Participants initially fixated a to-be-avoided object more frequently than predicted by chance, but they also demonstrated avoidance of cue-matching objects later in the trial. When provided more time between cue stimulus and search array, participants continued to be initially captured by a cued-color item. Furthermore, avoidance of cue-matching objects later in the trial was not contingent on initial capture by a cue-matching object. These results suggest that the conflicting findings in previous negative-cue experiments may be explained by a mixture of two independent processes: initial attentional capture by memory-matching items and later avoidance of known irrelevant items. Public Significance Statement Attention can efficiently be guided toward relevant objects. For example, say you are searching for your friend's phone. Your friend's phone used to have a red case so you find your eyes drawn to red objects in the room. However, your friend recently got a new phone case that is not red. Can you use this "not red" information to help you search and avoid looking at red objects? Our work demonstrates that attention is initially drawn toward irrelevant objects (red objects in this example), but these irrelevant objects can also be avoided. Furthermore, later avoidance is not dependent on having attended these irrelevant objects earlier.