The distractive effects on attentional task performance in different paradigms are analyzed in this paper. I demonstrate how distractors may negatively affect (interference effect), positively (redundancy effect) or neutrally (null effect). Distractor effects described in literature are...

Guided search is a mechanism that controls and optimizes the deployment of attention during visual search and allows one to pay attention only to highly relevant items. For instance, when searching for a conjunction of two features, we are able to select a feature-marked subset (e.g., all items...