Understanding of attentional suppression is incomplete without consideration of motivation and context

Luck, Gaspelin, Folk, Remington, and Theeuwes (2021) provide a valuable status report on our collective understanding of attentional capture, and they succeed at identifying common ground and articulating persisting points of discord. Here, I contribute two points. First, while there is limited evidence individuals can explicitly and proactively suppress salient distractors, investigations into this question have not always considered participants’ motivation and strategy use. Second, in evaluating how attentional suppression is guided by past experience, or selection history, one must consider the significant role of associative learning, which is revealed via context-dependent phenomena.