Children can suppress salient distractors.

Abstract

From a very young age, our perceptual system is particularly sensitive to salient events. When such events are irrelevant, adults can prevent them from capturing attention by suppressing the salient features and by prioritizing task-relevant information. Previous research suggests that both distractor-suppression and target-prioritization mechanisms are not yet fully developed at ages 5-6. However, this work has not clearly disentangled the two mechanisms. Here, we specifically investigated whether children can suppress the salient feature of an irrelevant distractor. Two groups of children (aged 5-6 and 8-9) searched for a shape-defined target among heterogeneously shaped nontargets. All items had the same color throughout the experiment, but on two thirds of the trials, one item (the singleton distractor) had a unique color that changed at the beginning of each block. We expected this distractor to interfere with search performance during the first half of each block (i.e., when its color was novel). The critical question was whether this interference would be reduced during the second block half (i.e., with enough experience with the distractor's color). This finding would indicate that the children suppressed the salient distractor color. We found clear evidence for feature-based suppression, and this effect was similar for the two age groups. These findings indicate that feature-based suppression develops early and may already be established by ages 5-6. More broadly, they are consistent with accounts in which suppression emerges through implicit learning or habituation-like mechanisms that are operational early in development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Journal of Experimental Psychology General, 2026 · DOI ↗