Greta Manini¹ (), Francisco Garre-Frutos², Fabiano Botta², Elisa Martín-Arévalo², Juan Lupiáñez²; ¹University of Verona, ²University of Granada

A central claim of the perceptual load theory (Forster & Lavie, 2008) is that high perceptual load prevents the processing of irrelevant distractors. In our recent work (Manini et al., 2025), we replicated the classic finding that distractors do not impair performance under high-load. However, we also observed an unexpected pattern: reaction times (RTs) were significantly faster on distractor-present than distractor-absent trials. Given that, in this task, the distractor is positioned outside the relevant search array, the absence of distractor processing should lead to no effect, rather than facilitation. Furthermore, these observations were accompanied by increased error rates, leading us to hypothesize that this reversed effect reflects spatially controlled attentional capture. That is, the distractor may act as an alerting stimulus that speeds responses, while attentional shifting toward its location is controlled early, since the distractor never corresponds to the target. To test this hypothesis, we first selected all the studies employing the same Forster and Lavie (2008) task, meta-analyzing the effect of the distractor presence. This revealed a significant and robust facilitation in high-load across the perceptual load literature. We then re-analyzed a subset of studies with open-access datasets available to test whether the target-distractor spatial proximity could be modulating search performance. This revealed that speed-ups were primarily driven by distractors appearing near the target, whereas distractors far from the target were associated with higher error rates. Overall, our findings demonstrate that distractors bias attention even in the absence of clear performance costs. This challenges the perceptual load theory’s claim that irrelevant distractors are not processed under high load, and supports our proposal that facilitation effects may instead reflect a form of controlled attentional capture.