Learning to suppress likely distractor locations in visual search is driven by the local distractor frequency.

作者：Fredrik Allenmark, Bei Zhang, Zhuanghua Shi, Hermann J. Müller · 发表于：Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception & Performance · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.1037/xhp0001054 · 被引用次数：18 · 研究领域：Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies

Salient but task-irrelevant distractors interfere less with visual search when they appear in a display region where distractors have appeared more frequently in the past ("distractor-location probability cuing"). This effect could reflect the (re-)distribution of a global, limited attentional "inhibition resource." Accordingly, changing the frequency of distractor appearance in one display region should also affect the magnitude of interference generated by distractors in a different region. Alternatively, distractor-location learning may reflect a local response (e.g., "habituation") to distractors occurring at a particular location. In this case, the local distractor frequency in one display region should not affect distractor interference in a different region. To decide between these alternatives, we conducted three experiments in which participants searched for an orientation-defined target while ignoring a more salient orientation distractor that occurred more often in one versus another display region. Experiment 1 varied the ratio of distractors appearing in the frequent versus rare regions (60/40-90/10), with a fixed global distractor frequency. The results revealed the probability-cuing effect to increase with increasing probability ratio. In Experiments 2 and 3, one ("test") region was assigned the same local distractor frequency as in one of the conditions of Experiment 1, but a different frequency in the other region-dissociating local from global distractor fre...