Learning to resist distraction by spatially predictable luminance transients and color singletons: same or different mechanisms?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Stimuli that appear abruptly in the visual field or differ from the surrounding stimuli based on a given visual feature can capture attention and interfere with the visual search process if they are not targets. When both types of distractors appear with higher likelihood at a given location, observers can learn to reduce their impact (distractor-location effect). In the case of feature-singleton distractors, this can imply a cost for processing targets that appear at locations associated with a high distractor probability (target-location effect). This has been proposed as evidence that distractor interference originates in the competition between distractors and targets within an attentional map, whose inputs can be modified by experience. In this study, we conduct a series of experiments that confirmed previous finding related to feature-singleton distractors, but consistently showed that learning to predict the spatial occurrence of luminance transients induces a distractor-location effect in the absence of a target-location effect. Combining this finding with the fact that interference by luminance transients were larger when distractors were far from the target position, we suggest that different mechanisms are responsible for the reduction of distractor interference in the case of color singletons and luminance transients.