Irrelevant salient distractors often capture attention, but given a sufficiently specific search template, these salient items no longer capture attention. In the present experiments, we investigated whether specific target templates are sufficient to resist capture, or whether experience with the salient distractors is also necessary. To test this hypothesis, observers completed four blocks of trials, each with a different-colored irrelevant singleton present on half of the trials. Color singletons captured attention early within a block, but after sufficient experience with the irrelevant singletons, those singletons no longer captured attention in the second halves of the blocks. This result suggests that to resist capture, a specific target template must be accompanied by experience-dependent attentional tuning to distractor properties.Keywords Attentional capture . Cognitive control . Attentional control . LearningThe world is filled with distractions, ranging from the abrupt appearance of an Internet pop-up ad to the sound of a coffee grinder at the local bistro. A primary purpose of attention is to restrict processing to items relevant to our current behavior and to minimize interference from irrelevant distractors. An important issue in the attentional-control literature has centered on the mechanisms of this restriction, with two rival hypotheses emerging to explain when attention is captured by distracting information. One account proposes that attention is stimulus-driven and that salient distractors capture attention irrespective of one's goals or attentional set (Theeuwes, 1992(Theeuwes, , 2010. Another account proposes that attention is driven by one's goals and that attentional capture is contingent on one's attentional set; only distractors matching a current attentional set will capture attention (e.g., Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992). Against this backdrop, much of the past 20 years of research has focused on distinguishing stimulus-driven capture from contingent capture, with a focus on which of these two modes of selection is the "default" mode of attention (Kawahara, 2010).Strong evidence for stimulus-driven capture has come from the additional-singleton paradigm (Theeuwes, 1992). In this task, observers search for a shape singleton among homogeneous distractors (e.g., a circle among diamonds) and report the orientation of a line that appears inside the target shape. On half of the trials, one of the distractors is a different color, making it a salient singleton distractor. Because the target is never the color singleton, an observer with perfect goal-driven control has no reason to attend to this additional singleton, and the presence of the singleton should not slow response times (RTs) to the target. However, the presence of an irrelevant color singleton does slow RTs to the target (see Theeuwes, 2010, for an extensive review). Because the color singleton is irrelevant to an observer's goal of finding the shape singleton, slowed RTs when the color singleton is present can be ...

Distraction impairs performance of many important, everyday tasks. Attentional control limits distraction by preferentially selecting important items for limited-capacity cognitive operations. Research in attentional control has typically investigated the degree to which selection of items is stimulus-driven versus goal-driven. Recent work finds that when observers initially learn a task, the selection is based on stimulus-driven factors, but through experience, goal-driven factors have an increasing influence. The modulation of selection by goals has been studied within the paradigm of learned distractor rejection, in which experience over a sequence of trials enables individuals eventually to ignore a perceptually salient distractor. The experiments presented examine whether observers can generalize learned distractor rejection to novel distractors. Observers searched for a target and ignored a salient color-singleton distractor that appeared in half of the trials. In Experiment 1, observers who learned distractor rejection in a variable environment rejected a novel distractor more effectively than observers who learned distractor rejection in a less variable, homogeneous environment, demonstrating that variable, heterogeneous stimulus environments encourage generalizable learned distractor rejection. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated the time course of learned distractor rejection across the experiment and found that after experiencing four color-singleton distractors in different blocks, observers could effectively reject subsequent novel color-singleton distractors. These results suggest that the optimization of attentional control to the task environment can be interpreted as a form of learning, demonstrating experience's critical role in attentional control.

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Recent neuroimaging studies suggest that early sensory areas such as area V1 are recruited to actively maintain a selected feature of the item held in visual short-term memory (VSTM). These findings raise the possibility that visual attention operates in similar manners across perceptual and memory representations to a certain extent, despite memory-level and perception-level selections are functionally dissociable. If VSTM operates by retaining "reasonable copies" of scenes constructed during sensory processing (Serences et al., 2009, p. 207, the sensory recruitment hypothesis), then it is possible that selective attention can be guided by both exogenous (peripheral) and endogenous (central) cues during VSTM maintenance. Yet, the results from the previous studies that examined this issue are inconsistent. In the present study, we investigated whether attention can be directed to a specific item's location represented in VSTM with the exogenous cue in a well-controlled setting. The results from the four experiments suggest that, as observed with the endogenous cue, the exogenous cue can efficiently guide selective attention during VSTM maintenance. The finding is not only consistent with the sensory recruitment hypothesis but also validates the legitimacy of the exogenous cue use in past and future studies.

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