Abstract
Recent findings suggest that attentional and oculomotor control is heavily affected by past experience, giving rise to selection and suppression history effects, so that target selection is facilitated if they appear at frequently attended locations, and distractor filtering is facilitated at frequently ignored locations. While selection history effects once instantiated seem to be long-lasting, whether suppression history is similarly durable is still debated. We assessed the permanence of these effects in a unique experimental setting investigating eye-movements, where the locations associated with statistical unbalances were exclusively linked with either target selection or distractor suppression. Experiment 1 and 2 explored the survival of suppression history in the long and in the short term, respectively, revealing that its lingering traces are relatively short lived. Experiment 3 showed that in the very same experimental context, selection history effects were long lasting. These results seem to suggest that different mechanisms support the learning-induced plasticity triggered by selection and suppression history. Specifically, while selection history may depend on lasting changes within stored representations of the visual space, suppression history effects hinge instead on a functional plasticity which is transient in nature, and involves spatial representations which are constantly updated and adaptively sustain ongoing oculomotor control.
Highlights
Recent findings suggest that attentional and oculomotor control is heavily affected by past experience, giving rise to selection and suppression history effects, so that target selection is facilitated if they appear at frequently attended locations, and distractor filtering is facilitated at frequently ignored locations
The target-directed saccades observed during Test in distractor-present conditions could represent a ceiling performance, beyond which there could be no further improvements. If such optimization affected performance with both High Frequency (HF) and Low Frequency (LF) distractors, it would hinder any distinction between the two conditions at Test, even if the differential traces of suppression history had been consolidated
In a new group of participants, we replicated the basic suppression history results[38], once again confirming that eye-movements are readily adjusted when distractor frequency is biased across the visual space, as in the Training phase
Summary
Recent findings suggest that attentional and oculomotor control is heavily affected by past experience, giving rise to selection and suppression history effects, so that target selection is facilitated if they appear at frequently attended locations, and distractor filtering is facilitated at frequently ignored locations. Experiment 3 showed that in the very same experimental context, selection history effects were long lasting These results seem to suggest that different mechanisms support the learning-induced plasticity triggered by selection and suppression history. Human behavior can adapt quickly and precisely to meet the ever-changing requests of the surrounding environment, especially with respect to events that occur repeatedly and/or can be predicted from past experience[1,2]. These changes reflect an extraordinary ability of the brain to initiate neural plasticity in response to events and their outcomes, a fundamental feature for several neural circuits across the lifespan[3]. At least three sources of attentional control have been identified: (i) Attention can be reflexively oriented towards conspicuous or unexpected stimuli, in bottom-up; (ii) it can be guided towards items that are relevant for the current goals, irrespectively of their apparent features, in Scientific Reports | (2021) 11:13761
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