The ability to overcome attentional capture and attend goal-relevant information is typically viewed as a volitional, effortful process that relies on the maintenance of current task priorities or "attentional sets" in working memory. However, the visual system possesses statistical learning mechanisms that can incidentally encode probabilistic associations between goal-relevant objects and the attributes likely to define them. Thus, it is possible that statistical learning may contribute to the establishment of a given attentional set and modulate the effects of attentional capture. Here we provide evidence for such a mechanism, showing that implicitly learned associations between a search target and its likely color directly influence the ability of a salient color precue to capture attention in a classic attentional capture task. This indicates a novel role for statistical learning in the modulation of attentional capture, and emphasizes the role that this learning may play in goal-directed attentional control more generally.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 3. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 26 September 2016.
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#21,629,493
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Outputs from Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception & Performance
#847
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#238,044
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Outputs of similar age from Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception & Performance
#27
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Altmetric has tracked 34,361,833 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 36th percentile – i.e., 36% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 3,176 research outputs from this source. They receive a mean Attention Score of 4.0. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 72% of its peers.
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