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- Learning to suppress a location is configuration-dependentPublication . Gao, Ya; De Waard, Jasper; Theeuwes, JanWhere and what we attend is very much determined by what we have encountered in the past. Recent studies have shown that people learn to extract statistical regularities in the environment resulting in attentional suppression of locations that were likely to contain a distractor, efectively reducing the amount of attentional capture. Here, we asked whether this suppression efect due to statistical learning is dependent on the specifc confguration within which it was learned. The current study employed the additional singleton paradigm using search arrays that had a confguration consisting of set sizes of either four or 10 items. Each confguration contained its own high probability distractor location. If learning would generalize across set size confgurations, both high probability locations would be suppressed equally, regardless of set size. However, if learning to suppress is dependent on the confguration within which it was learned, one would expect only suppression of the high probability location that matched the confguration within which it was learned. The results show the latter, suggesting that implicitly learned suppression is confguration-dependent. Thus, we conclude that the high probability location is learned within the confguration context within which it is presented
- Statistical learning of distractor locations is dependent on task contextPublication . De Waard, Jasper; Van Moorselaar, Dirk; Bogaerts, Louisa; Theeuwes, JanThrough statistical learning, humans can learn to suppress visual areas that often contain distractors. Recent findings suggest that this form of learned suppression is insensitive to context, putting into question its real-life relevance. The current study presents a different picture: we show contextdependent learning of distractor-based regularities. Unlike previous studies which typically used background cues to differentiate contexts, the current study manipulated task context. Specifically, the task alternated from block to block between a compound search and a detection task. In both tasks, participants searched for a unique shape, while ignoring a uniquely colored distractor item. Crucially, a different high-probability distractor location was assigned to each task context in the training blocks, and all distractor locations were made equiprobable in the testing blocks. In a control experiment, participants only performed a compound search task such that the contexts were made indistinguishable, but the high-probability locations changed in exactly the same way as in the main experiment. We analyzed response times for different distractor locations and show that participants can learn to suppress a location in a context-dependent way, but suppression from previous task contexts lingers unless a new high-probability location is introduced.