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

Ya Gao*, Jan Theeuwes

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)96-104
Number of pages9
JournalPsychonomic Bulletin and Review
Volume27
Issue number1
Early online date3 Dec 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Feb 2020

Keywords

  • Attentional capture
  • Statistical regularities
  • Visual search
  • Working memory

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