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- Learning to suppress a location does not depend on knowing which locationPublication . Gao, Ya; Theeuwes, JanThe present study investigated whether explicit knowledge and awareness regarding the regularities present in the display afects statistical learning (SL) in visual search. Participants performed the additional singleton paradigm in which a salient distractor was presented much more often in one location than in all other locations. Previous studies have shown that participants learn this regularity as the location that is most likely to contain a distractor becomes suppressed relative to all other locations. In the current study, after each trial, participants had to either indicate the location of the distractor or the location of the target. Those participants that reported the distractor location, were very much aware of the regularity present in the display. However, participants that reported the target location were basically unaware of the regularity regarding the distractor. The results showed no diference between these groups in the amount of suppression of the high-probability location. This indicates that regardless of whether participants had explicit knowledge or not, the suppression was basically the same. We conclude that explicit knowledge and awareness does not contribute to learning to suppress a location. This conclusion is consistent with the notion that statistical learning is automatic, operating without conscious efort or awareness.
- 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