Figure 1.

Hypotheses. Different neural processes and their interactions may mediate the selection of behaviorally relevant information from natural scenes. In the example, people are the object category that is relevant to ongoing behavior (i.e., target category) and cars are the object category that was previously but is not presently relevant (i.e., distracter category), whereas all other object categories present in the scene are never task relevant (i.e., neutral category, such as trees). If visual search in natural scenes is accomplished solely through the enhancement of relevant information, processing of the target category should be enhanced relative to both neutral and distracter categories (left). If category detection additionally requires the suppression of a previous attentional set, distracter processing should be reduced compared with processing of the neutral categories (right).