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Salient items in a visual scene can capture our attention. However, when such items are not relevant to our current goals, we are able to ignore them. This is exemplified by our ability to keep our eyes (and attention) on the road when driving at night despite the potentially distracting lights from the dashboard. Because the ability to avoid distraction is a fundamental part of efficient visual processing, researchers have devoted considerable effort to learning more about details of the underlying mechanisms. We continue that endeavor here by explicitly testing two broadly different types of explanations of our ability to ignore salient distractors. According to one explanation for distractor ignoring, attention can be guided in a top-down manner to favor task-relevant items and avoid irrelevant ones. A large body of research has demonstrated that goal-matching features receive prioritized processing over distractors that lack relevant features (Becker et al., ; Folk et al., , ; Lien et al., ). Moreover, a recent theory proposed that our ability to prevent attentional capture by salient-but-irrelevant distractors is also due to goal-driven control, in which the feature that signals salience is perceptually downweighted (the ; Gaspelin & Luck, , ; Luck et al., ; Sawaki & Luck, ). The signal suppression hypothesis has received support from multiple sources. In behavioral studies, using a probe task that measures the allocation of attention during the initial exposure to a visual display, it was found that probes on salient task-irrelevant color singleton distractors had lower report rates than probes on nonsalient nontarget items (Chang & Egeth, ; Gaspelin et al., ; Ma & Abrams, , ; Stilwell & Gaspelin, ). Similarly, initial saccades following stimulus onset were found to be less frequently directed to a salient compared with a nonsalient distractor (Drennan & Gaspelin, ; Gaspelin et al., , ; Ipata et al., ; H. Zhang et al., ). Measurements of event-related potentials show that such behavioral avoidance of salient distractors is often preceded by a positive waveform with a distribution contralateral to the distractor location—a distractor positivity (P) component, thought to index inhibitory control (Gaspelin, Lamy, et al., ; Gaspelin & Luck, ; Gaspar & McDonald, ; Hickey et al., ; Jannati et al., ; Sawaki & Luck, ). In those studies, the observed effects of distractor avoidance may reflect a combination of distractor inhibition and other forms of attentional guidance (e.g., target feature enhancement, biased competition; Chang & Egeth, ; Desimone & Duncan, ; Gaspelin et al., ; Khodayari et al., ; Wolfe, ). Regardless of the specific mechanism, these effects all rely on top-down knowledge about the task goals, and thus broadly support the existence of goal-driven control mechanisms that actively prioritize goal-relevant features and meanwhile inhibit capture by salient, irrelevant features. In contrast, another viewpoint, the , rejects a role of active goal-driven control but attributes the absence of capture by salient distractors as a nonvolitional consequence of narrowly focused attention. Specifically, the theory claims that a relatively small area of a scene is selected (i.e., a small “attentional window”) at any one time during a serial search that requires fine discrimination (Theeuwes, , ). Salient stimuli outside the attentional window do not capture attention—not because they are actively avoided in a goal-directed manner but instead because their salience signals are passively excluded from spatial selection and thus fail to propagate to later stages of processing. The key distinction between this account and goal-driven theories, therefore, is whether distractor ignoring reflects active control (guiding attention away from irrelevant features) or passive exclusion (shielding unattended items from selection). Evidence supporting the attentional window account showed that distractor ignoring has only been observed during searches for a nonsalient, prespecified target shape among heterogeneous distractors (a task), where attention needs to be relatively narrowly focused (i.e., ; Chang & Egeth, ; Gaspelin et al., , ; Stilwell & Gaspelin, ), but not in a search for a unique, and thus salient, target shape among homogeneous distractors (an task), where attention is spread more broadly (i.e., ; Theeuwes, , , ).