Have you ever had the experience of talking with someone and partway through, you realize that while you both might be using the same vocabulary, what you mean is quite different? Sometimes, this comes from a generational gap. Slang words change frequently, and some words don’t have the same meaning that they once did. For example, consider the phrases “spill the tea,” “I am shaking,” or a phrase one of us recently learned from our students – “You ate that!”. Other times, people may not use words correctly. Consider the classic scene in the movie The Princess Bride, where Inigo Montoya, in response to hearing his boss Vizzini say “inconceivable!” again, replies with “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Definitions seem like a pretty fundamental thing, and the scientific study of visual attention is no different. You might think that researchers in perception and cognition all agree about what we mean when we use simple terms like “distraction,” “task,” or “target” to talk about visual attention, right? You might be surprised to learn from a recent paper published in the Psychonomic Society journal, Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, that even these definitions are not so straightforward. Terms in cognitive research can be more complicated than they seem. When engaging in scientific discussion, confusion can sometimes arise when people think they’re talking about the same thing, but actually mean different things.

This paper by Heinrich Liesefeld, Dominique Lamy (pictured below), and 19 other co-authors started with this common experience – in fact, this paper comes out of a workshop that the authors attended. Rather than talking past each other, as we do too often, they said, “Well, we don’t agree about this, but let’s work on that – if we want to move forward as a field, we need some common ground.” So, what they’ve done in this paper is to lay out a range of common terms in cognitive research, from distraction to task to target and provide consensus definitions for all of us to work from.

There are a few important subtleties in what they’ve done – they’re not expecting their readers to agree with them (in fact, many of the authors don’t agree with each other) and they’re not expecting these definitions to be unchanging – they’re putting them into the literature as a starting point. We have to imagine that the workshop a couple of years ago had a certain amount of this experience – of various authors being unwilling to choose someone else’s definition, because their own definition is so central to their research, but that’s not the point of their work or the paper. In order for scientific progress to be made, it’s important for researchers to start with a set of shared definitions to describe the methodological approaches, phenomena, and theoretical ideas in their work.

Something that’s particularly worth highlighting here is that all of the authors didn’t enter into this work expecting to agree or to set down their particular viewpoints – in fact, they describe it as an adversarial collaboration in the introduction. Now, there’s still plenty of room to disagree, but the whole idea of an adversarial collaboration is to move closer to the actual answer, accepting that you, as a member of the collaboration, may or may not be right.

To develop the definitions in this paper, the authors worked in a set of subgroups in the workshop to come as close as possible to an agreement on the terminology. In the paper, the definitions are presented in a series of essays that are organized around ten related clusters of terms: Stimuli, Features, Tasks, Paradigms, Templates and Strategies, Types of Distraction, Priority Map, Guidance, Modulation, and Timing. Each essay includes a breakdown of the terminology used, as well as references for further reading. The authors also include a glossary to allow readers to easily find specific definitions.

To provide some examples, consider the term ‘feature’. We might generally think of a ‘feature’ as some kind of property or attribute, but features can be both fairly simple (e.g., the color red), or more complex (e.g., the properties that allow you to recognize a piece of fruit as being a pineapple). Things can get more complicated, of course, if you consider how features relate to one another –something that’s important when thinking about visual attention. For example, consider the term ‘singleton’, which refers to the only item with a particular absolute feature among a set of other stimuli. If you look at the images below, which of the following would you consider to be ‘singletons’?

The examples in (a), (b), and (c) are all fairly straightforward – the central element in (a) is a singleton in color, (b) is a singleton in orientation, and (c) is a singleton in color, but not orientation. The other examples are a bit more complicated. The item in (d) would also be considered a singleton, even though it’s not very salient. The central item in (e) has a unique color, but most scientists would not consider it a singleton. The one in (f) would be a singleton locally (within the left side), but not in the whole display. With examples like these, it’s easy to see how scientific progress would be much slower if scientists didn’t start with some shared definitions.

Now, having given you a whole bunch of examples, how might you want to use this paper? Who is it for? If you’re a scientist early in your career, it’s a nice place to see consensus definitions as of 2024, but if you’re further along, you almost certainly have your own opinions about the terms and how they’re defined. If that sounds like you, this paper gives you something to point to – either as a definition you agree with, or one you want to refute. Having this paper helps all of us, and while our views might change as we learn more about cognition, we shouldn’t let it get to our heads.

Featured Psychonomic Society article

Liesefeld, H. R., Lamy, D., Gaspelin, N., Geng, J. J., Kerzel, D., Schall, J. D., … & Wolfe, J. (2024). Terms of debate: Consensus definitions to guide the scientific discourse on visual distraction. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 1-28. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-023-02820-3