Abstract
Statistical regularities in our environment enhance perception and modulate the allocation of spatial attention. Surprisingly little is known about how learning-induced changes in spatial attention transfer across tasks. In this study, we investigated whether a spatial attentional bias learned in one task transfers to another. Most of the experiments began with a training phase in which a search target was more likely to be located in one quadrant of the screen than in the other quadrants. An attentional bias toward the high-probability quadrant developed during training (probability cuing). In a subsequent, testing phase, the target’s location distribution became random. In addition, the training and testing phases were based on different tasks. Probability cuing did not transfer between visual search and a foraging-like task. However, it did transfer between various types of visual search tasks that differed in stimuli and difficulty. These data suggest that different visual search tasks share a common and transferrable learned attentional bias. However, this bias is not shared by high-level, decision-making tasks such as foraging.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 50-66 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics |
Volume | 77 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2014 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2014, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.
Keywords
- Incidental learning
- Probability cuing
- Spatial attention
- Visual search