ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2022
Statistical learning in visual search reflects distractor rarity, not only attentional suppression.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Within-trial and across-trial distractor rejection mechanisms.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- Temporal dynamics of adapting to novel contexts during the generalization of learned spatial suppression.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- Differential Modulation of Attention by Aversive Associative and Statistical Learning in Distinct Visual Search Modes.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Post-loss speeding or post-win slowing? An empirical note on the interpretation of decision-making time as a function of previous outcome.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- Intentional learning establishes multiple attentional sets that simultaneously guide attention.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2024Article
- Habituation to visual onsets is affected by local and global distractors rate.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- Target templates and the time course of distractor location learning.Scientific reports · 2023Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
In visual search tasks, salient distractors may capture attention involuntarily, but interference can be reduced when the salient distractor appears more frequently on one out of several possible positions. The reduction was attributed to attentional suppression of the high-probability position. However, all previous studies on this topic compared performance on the high-probability position to the remaining positions, which had a low probability of containing the distractor. Therefore, it is not clear whether the difference resulted from reduced interference on the high-probability position or from increased interference on the low-probability positions. To decide between these alternatives, we compared high-probability and low-probability with equal-probability positions. Consistent with attentional suppression, interference was reduced on the high-probability position compared with equal-probability positions. However, there was also an increase in interference on low-probability positions compared with equal-probability positions. The increase is in line with previous reports of boosted interference when distractors are rare. Our results show that the experimental design used in previous research is insufficient to separate effects of attentional suppression and those of distractor rarity.
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