Author Description

Suppression of visual locations in our environment is critical to efficiently navigating our visual world. Everyday tasks, such as crossing the street, are made more efficient by attending only to relevant locations and suppressing locations known to contain distracting stimuli. In a laboratory setting, suppression of visual locations (location suppression) has been investigated using statistical learning paradigms, where participants implicitly learn to de-prioritize or suppress locations in the visual world where salient distractors routinely appear. While the process of location suppression has been described and replicated in detail, there is still much we do not understand. It is still debated, for example, whether suppression is an early or late-stage attention process. Relatedly, it is currently unknown whether location suppression occurs in spatiotopic (real-world) or retinotopic (retina/eye-centered) coordinates, which could give insight into this early vs. late distinction. Retinotopic frames are constructed and utilized during early attention stages, while spatiotopic frames are utilized during late stages of attention. It is the goal of this paper to investigate these questions in detail, using a novel set of paradigms, and provide evidence for either retinotopic or spatiotopic mapping of location suppression. In the first part of this paper, I review attention broadly, followed by a more detailed review of attention priority and suppression and their associated visual coordinate systems. I conclude with a series of three experiments that are designed to examine whether location suppression, occurs retinotopically or spatiotopically. The results of two of these experiments provide evidence that such reference frames are spatiotopic in nature, implying a relatively late locus for learned suppression. Thus, my findings enrich our understanding of location suppression, a process critical to prioritizing and allocating visual attention.