Mustafa Zeyd Söyük¹, Anna Schubö¹; ¹Philipps-University Marburg

Attentional control strategies adapt to visual field regularities like distractor prevalence or spatial patterns. Previous research has shown that frequent exposure to distractors reduces their interference, and spatial learning can tune down interference by deprioritizing high-probability distractor locations. So far, these effects have been studied separately. Here, we investigated how the extent of distractor practice influences distractor location learning in an additional singleton search task. We expected that performing a search task with high distractor prevalence will result in efficient distractor handling, which might reduce the need for additional distractor location learning. Participants completed a training and test phase, searching for a diamond-shaped target among homogenous non-target items, with a color distractor appearing in some trials. During training, distractor prevalence was 20% for the low-prevalence group and 80% for the high-prevalence group. In the test phase, distractor prevalence was equalized (66%), and distractors were more likely to appear at a high-probability location in both groups. As expected, the low-prevalence group experienced larger distractor interference during training than the high-prevalence group. In the test phase, both groups showed less distractor interference for distractors at the high-probability location (compared to low-probability locations). Interestingly, the high-prevalence group showed no impairment in target detection at high-probability location when the distractor was absent, whereas the low-prevalence group exhibited impaired target detection at this location under the same conditions. These differences in target processing at the high-probability location might result from the varying amount of distractor practice the groups experienced during the training phase. We assume that during training, the high-prevalence group developed a control strategy to selectively ignore the distractor whereas the low-prevalence group did not and, as a consequence, broadly suppressed any signal at the high-probability location. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that attentional control strategies are adapted to environmental demands.

Acknowledgements: This research was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation – project number 290878970-GRK 2271, project 9).