Probabilistic visual attentional guidance triggers “feature avoidance” response errors.

Abstract

Spatial attention affects not only where we look, but also what we perceive and remember in attended and unattended locations. Previous work has shown that manipulating attention via top-down cues or bottom-up capture leads to characteristic patterns of feature errors. Here we investigated whether experience-driven attentional guidance-and probabilistic attentional guidance more generally-leads to similar feature errors. We conducted a series of pre-registered experiments employing a learned spatial probability or probabilistic pre-cue; all experiments involved reporting the color of one of four simultaneously presented stimuli using a continuous response modality. When the probabilistic cues guided attention to an invalid (nontarget) location, participants were less likely to report the target color, as expected. But strikingly, their errors tended to be clustered around a nontarget color opposite the color of the invalidly-cued nontarget. This "feature avoidance" was found for both experience-driven and top-down probabilistic cues, and appears to be the product of a strategic-but possibly subconscious-behavior, occurring when information about the features and/or feature-location bindings outside the focus of attention is limited. The findings emphasize the importance of considering how different types of attentional guidance can exert different effects on feature perception and memory reports. Public Significance StatementThis study revealed that guiding visual attention to where a target is likely to appear impacts how the features of that target are processed in a unique way, different from previously reported feature errors induced when attention is rapidly shifted, divided, or captured away by a distractor. The findings highlight the importance of considering not only where attention is focused but how it got there, and also of using tools that allow for a precise reporting of what we perceive, encode, and recall following the allocation of spatial attention.