Probability cueing of distractor locations: both intertrial facilitation and statistical learning mediate interference reduction

Goschy, Harriet; Bakos, Sarolta; Müller, Hermann J.; Zehetleitner, Michael

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01195

Cited by 134 publications

(199 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Considering in particular the deployment of selective attention across the visual space, the degree of interference determined by salient but irrelevant visual stimuli that appear at locations that in the past have been often associated with distracting events is reduced (Ferrante et al, 2018;Goschy, Bakos, Müller, & Zehetleitner, 2014;Leber, Gwinn, Hong, & O'Toole, 2016;Sauter, Liesefeld, & Müller, in press;Sauter, Liesefeld, Zehetleitner, & Müller, 2018;Wang & Theeuwes, 2018a; for a recent review see Chelazzi, Marini, Pascucci, & Turatto, 2019). Depending on the specific manipulations performed, these effects have been observed for relatively wide regions of the visual field (i.e., contrasting visual hemifields with high vs. low distractor frequency, as in Goschy et al, 2014;Sauter et al, 2018;in press), but also for discrete spatial locations, emerging in a graded fashion which reflected the precise statistical contingencies applied (Ferrante et al, 2018;Wang & Theeuwes, 2018a. Overall these studies suggest that suppression history may alter topographic maps of the visual space that code the attentional priority of the stimuli in the visual field (e.g., Todd & Manaligod, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Suppression history of distractor location biases attentional and oculomotor control

Theeuwes

Libera

2019

Visual Cognition

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Past selection experience greatly affects the deployment of attention such that targets are more readily selected if their features or locations were more frequently selected in the past. Crucially, recent studies have shown similar experience-dependent effects also for salient task irrelevant stimuli: distractors exerted less interference if they appeared at a location where they were presented more often, relatively to other possible locations. Here we investigated the effects of such suppression history on the immediate behavioural correlates of attentional deployment, i.e., eye movements. Participants were to make saccadic eye movements to a target stimulus, while ignoring a highly distracting irrelevant visual onset appearing abruptly on the screen in a proportion of trials. Crucially, this irrelevant onset occurred more frequently in two locations on the visual display and our results showed that, relatively to distractors elsewhere, onsets presented at these locations became easier to ignore, giving rise to reduced oculomotor capture. Consistent with the notion that experience can alter attentional deployment towards spatial locations, these findings indicate that, through learning, the priority of high frequency locations becomes suppressed, attenuating the intrinsic saliency of distractors appearing therein. Traces left by individual events of attentional suppression decrease the processing priority of coordinates within topographic maps of the visual space.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Suppression history of distractor location biases attentional and oculomotor control

Theeuwes

Libera

2019

Visual Cognition

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“…Critically, however, this appears specific to conditions that allow observers to learn, often implicitly, from statistical regularities across search displays (Chelazzi, Marini, Pascucci, & Turatto, 2019;van Moorselaar & Slagter, 2020). For example, a recent study by Wang and Theeuwes (2018) demonstrated that in a mixed-feature variant of the additional singleton paradigm, salient singleton distractors were more efficiently ignored at locations with a high distractor probability, even though almost all participants were unaware of the embedded statistical regularity (see also) (Ferrante et al, 2018;Goschy, Bakos, Müller, & Zehetleitner, 2014;Leber, Gwinn, Hong, & O'Toole, 2016). These findings add to a rapidly growing body of research that shows that distractor inhibition may not be under voluntary, top-down control, but greatly relies on expectations derived from past experience about the likelihood of events or statistical learning (Noonan, Crittenden, Jensen, & Stokes, 2018;Theeuwes, 2019;van Moorselaar & Slagter, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural mechanisms underlying distractor inhibition on the basis of feature and/or spatial expectations

Moorselaar

Daneshtalab

Slagter

2020

Preprint

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AbstractA rapidly growing body of research indicates that inhibition of distracting information may not be under flexible, top-down control, but instead heavily relies on expectations derived from past experience about the likelihood of events or statistical learning. Yet, how expectations about distracting information influence distractor inhibition at the neural level remains unclear. To determine how expectations about distractor features and/or location modulate distractor processing, we measured EEG while participants performed two variants of the additional singleton paradigm. Critically, in these different variants, target and distractor features either randomly swapped across trials, or were fixed, allowing for the development of distractor feature-based expectations. Moreover, participants performed these tasks both with and without a high probability distractor location. Our results show that both distractor feature- and location learning contributed to distractor inhibition, as indicated by corresponding reductions in distractor costs during visual search and an earlier distractor-evoked Pd ERP. Large individual differences further suggest a functional dissociation between early and late Pd components, with the former reflecting early sensory suppression related to intertrial priming and the latter reflecting suppression sensitive to statistical learning over a longer time scale. No increase in anticipatory alpha-band activity was observed over visual regions representing the expected distractor location, suggesting that statistical learning may rely on activity-silent mechanisms, such as synaptic plasticity, or that proactive spatial inhibition was not reliably induced with the current study design. Together, our findings provide further support to the idea that distractor suppression strongly relies on expectations derived from past experience and reveal the neural mechanisms underlying spatial and non-spatial distractor learning.

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“…When we look for a unique target object within a rich visual scene, often other objects stand out from the background of nontarget items and may capture attention before the target is attended. In such visual pop-out search tasks, observers become more efficient, over time, in minimizing the interference generated by such salient but task-irrelevant distractors when these consistently occur in certain regions of the search display (Goschy, Bakos, Müller, & Zehetleitner, 2014). However, the mechanisms underlying this learning effect, termed probability cueing of distractor locations (Goschy et al, 2014), are poorly understood: Do observers learn to suppress distractors on the basis of their likely location alone?…”

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confidence: 99%

Region-based shielding of visual search from salient distractors: Target detection is impaired with same- but not different-dimension distractors

Sauter

Liesefeld

Zehetleitner

et al. 2018

Atten Percept Psychophys

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216

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Shielding visual search against interference from salient distractors becomes more efficient over time for display regions where distractors appear more frequently, rather than only rarely Goschy, Bakos, Müller, & Zehetleitner (Frontiers in Psychology 5: 1195, 2014). We hypothesized that the locus of this learned distractor probability-cueing effect depends on the dimensional relationship of the to-be-inhibited distractor relative to the to-be-attended target. If the distractor and target are defined in different visual dimensions (e.g., a color-defined distractor and orientation-defined target, as in Goschy et al. (Frontiers in Psychology 5: 1195, 2014), distractors may be efficiently suppressed by down-weighting the feature contrast signals in the distractor-defining dimension Zehetleitner, Goschy, & Müller (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 38: 941-957, 2012), with stronger down-weighting being applied to the frequent- than to the rare-distractor region. However, given dimensionally coupled feature contrast signal weighting (cf. Müller J, Heller & Ziegler (Perception & Psychophysics 57:1-17, 1995), this dimension-(down-)weighting strategy would not be effective when the target and the distractors are defined within the same dimension. In this case, suppression may operate differently: by inhibiting the entire frequent-distractor region on the search-guiding master saliency map. The downside of inhibition at this level is that, although it reduces distractor interference in the inhibited (frequent-distractor) region, it also impairs target processing in that region-even when no distractor is actually present in the display. This predicted qualitative difference between same- and different-dimension distractors was confirmed in the present study (with 184 participants), thus furthering our understanding of the functional architecture of search guidance, especially regarding the mechanisms involved in shielding search from the interference of distractors that consistently occur in certain display regions.

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Probability cueing of distractor locations: both intertrial facilitation and statistical learning mediate interference reduction

Cited by 134 publications

References 51 publications

Suppression history of distractor location biases attentional and oculomotor control

Suppression history of distractor location biases attentional and oculomotor control

Neural mechanisms underlying distractor inhibition on the basis of feature and/or spatial expectations

Region-based shielding of visual search from salient distractors: Target detection is impaired with same- but not different-dimension distractors

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