Samantha Joubran¹, Rebecca McCabe², Kelyn Young¹, Naseem Al-Aidroos¹; ¹University of Guelph, ²Brock University

When visually searching for a large set of everyday objects, only those objects capture our attention, indicating we have adopted attentional control settings (ACS) based on long-term memory representations of those objects. Beyond our internal attentional goals, are long-term memory ACSs also influenced by the external environment? Across three experiments, we had participants memorize and then search for sets of 12-24 objects during a spatial blink task. In this task, a stream of 20 non-studied objects were presented in the center of the screen and participants reported the target (one of the memorized objects) that appeared within the stream. Either 2, 5, or 8 positions before the target, two distractors appeared above and below the central stream. One distractor was always a non-studied object while the other was sometimes a critical distractor (a memorized object). When the critical distractor was a memorized object, attention was captured away from the stream to the distractor’s spatial location which caused participants to miss the target; this did not occur if the distractors were both non-studied objects. The difference in accuracy is called a spatial blink and it showed attentional capture by the distractor. Across our experiments, we manipulated which memorized objects were presented as search targets allowing an investigation into how our interactions with the external environment can impact our ACS. While all memorized objects initially captured attention, over time, any objects that never appeared as search targets were pruned from the ACS and stopped capturing attention. This suggests that objects that are searched for, but never encountered as a target, will eventually be pruned from the ACSs. These results seem to demonstrate that while we can have internal goals that contribute to an ACS, our interactions with the environment can impact the maintenance and updating of our ACS.

Acknowledgements: Funded through NSERC