Reduced contextual uncertainty facilitates learning what to attend to and what to ignore.
Attentional capture
Contextual cueing
Distractor suppression
Statistical learning
Visual search
Journal
Attention, perception & psychophysics
ISSN: 1943-393X
Titre abrégé: Atten Percept Psychophys
Pays: United States
ID NLM: 101495384
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
10 Sep 2024
10 Sep 2024
Historique:
accepted:
18
06
2024
medline:
10
9
2024
pubmed:
10
9
2024
entrez:
10
9
2024
Statut:
aheadofprint
Résumé
Variability in the search environment has been shown to affect the capture of attention by salient distractors, as attentional capture is reduced when context variability is low. However, it remains unclear whether this reduction in capture is caused by contextual learning or other mechanisms, grounded in generic context-structure learning. We set out to test this by training participants (n = 200) over two sessions in a visual search task, conducted online, where they gained experience with a small subset of search displays, which significantly reduced capture of attention by colour singletons. In a third session, we then tested participants on a mix of familiar and novel search displays and examined whether this reduction in capture was specific to familiar displays, indicative of contextual cueing effects, or would generalise to novel displays. We found no capture by the singleton in either the familiar or novel condition. Instead, our findings suggested that reduced statistical volatility reduced capture by allowing the development of generic predictions about task-relevant locations and features of the display. These findings add to the current debate about the determinants of capture by salient distractors by showing that capture is also affected by generic task regularities and by the volatility of the learning environment.
Identifiants
pubmed: 39254916
doi: 10.3758/s13414-024-02945-z
pii: 10.3758/s13414-024-02945-z
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Informations de copyright
© 2024. The Author(s).
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