Road signs are designed to capture attention quickly, ensuring rapid responses to important information in the environment. However, in everyday situations, similarly salient stimuli can become distractions when they are irrelevant to current goals. This phenomenon, known as attentional capture, raises the question of whether attention is automatically driven by stimulus salience or guided by task goals. The present study examined how abrupt-onset distractors influence attention during systematic visual search. Participants completed a task requiring a fixed search order, allowing distractor processing to be assessed relative to the target. The results suggest that abrupt-onset distractors are largely ignored and do not disrupt search, whereas regular distractors are processed and rapidly rejected when encountered before the target, but show little effect otherwise. These findings indicate that attentional selection is shaped by both stimulus properties and the structure of the search process.