Learning to suppress a distractor is not affected by working memory load

Ya Gao,Jan Theeuwes

doi:10.3758/s13423-019-01679-6

Abstract

Where and what we attend to is not only determined by our current goals but also 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 high-probability distractor locations, effectively reducing capture by a distractor. Here, we asked whether this statistical learning is dependent on working memory resources. The additional singleton task in which one location was more likely to contain a distractor was combined with a concurrent visual working memory task (Experiment 1) and a spatial working memory task (Experiment 2). The result showed that learning to suppress this high-probability location was not at all affected by working memory load. We conclude that learning to suppress a location is an implicit and automatic process that does not rely on visual or spatial working memory capacity, nor on executive control resources. We speculate that extracting regularities from the environment likely relies on long-term memory processes.

Highlights

Where and what we attend to is determined by our current goals and by what we have encountered in the past
A feedback screen of mean accuracies and average response times (RTs) for the two tasks was presented after each block, and participants were asked to answer two questions after the whole experiment. They were asked to indicate if they had noticed any Trials in which the RTs were larger than 2.5 standard deviations from the average response time per working memory load condition per participant or less than 200 ms were excluded from the RT analyses
Trials with a correct response on both the visual search task and the memory task were used in the RT analyses

Summary

Introduction

Where and what we attend to is determined by our current goals and 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 high-probability distractor locations, effectively reducing capture by a distractor. The result showed that learning to suppress this high-probability location was not at all affected by working memory load. Wang and Theeuwes (2018a, 2018b) used the classic additional singleton task and showed that statistical regularities regarding the location of the distractor affected selection. In these studies, participants searched for a salient shape singleton (i.e., a diamond between circles or a circle between diamonds) while ignoring a colored distractor singleton. It was argued that this type of suppression is proactive, as this location is already suppressed before the search display was presented (Wang, van Driel, Ort, & Theeuwes, 2019)

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Results

Conclusion