Less is More! Visual Suppression for Bottom-up and Top-down Attention in Dynamic Environments

Dynamic virtual environments pose growing challenges for users who must manage attention across competing visual elements, where distractors can divert focus from relevant objects in these scenarios. Because human attention functions as a filter, it is shaped by competing influences from bottom-up salience and top-down relevance. We explore the salience and relevance of objects and introduce suppression-based visual filtering mechanisms, implemented through Dim and Blur visual filters at Weak and Strong intensity levels. A controlled abstract virtual environment with colorful moving objects was used to evaluate these against Baseline (no filtering) across nine varied salience-relevance situations, involving 38 participants in visual search and sustained monitoring tasks. Results showed that visual suppression enhanced participants’ attention over Baseline, with Dim outperforming Blur, Strong exceeding Weak, and Dim-Strong achieving superior performance overall. These findings imply the principle of attention redistribution and offer insights for domains involving objects with varying salience and relevance.