Litian Chen¹ (), Freek van Ede², Heleen A. Slagter³; ¹Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, ²Institute Brain and Behaviour Amsterdam

Recent research shows that humans can learn to ignore a salient distractor when it more often occurs at a particular location while typically remaining unaware of this regularity. We previously found that such implicit distractor-location learning is viewer dependent, indicating that one learns how to avoid distraction from an egocentric perspective, rather than learns where distractors are more likely in the world. The current study examined whether awareness of the statistical regularity (implicit vs. explicit) affects the spatial reference frame for distractor location learning (egocentric vs. world-centered). In four experiments (n=96), participants performed an additional-singleton visual search task, displayed on a table top, while walking around the table. Critically, participants were either explicitly told (aware) of the high-probability distractor location or not (unaware) and the likely distractor location was either fixed from their perspective (egocentric) or fixed in the world (allocentric). Initial analyses replicated our past work showing that in the unaware group, learning where the distractor location was more likely exclusively occurred from a viewer-dependent perspective. They furthermore showed that awareness of the regularity enhanced the ability to ignore the distractor in a world-centered frame. These findings suggest that unconscious statistical learning is naturally confined to egocentric frames and that awareness may be a prerequisite for learning to inhibit distractor regularities in world-centered frames.