Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Salient distractors often capture our attention, disrupting ongoing tasks. Recent studies suggest that, through statistical learning, prior experiences regarding distractor locations can reduce distraction by suppressing their corresponding locations. However, the proactive neural mechanisms supporting this learned suppression remain unclear. Our findings demonstrate that participants learn to suppress locations that are more likely to contain distractors relative to other locations. Using frequency tagging in EEG recordings, we observed significantly different tagging responses between high- and low-probability locations, along with a general decrease in alpha power (8-12 Hz) before search onset. Notably, the higher tagging frequency power at high-probability locations suggests that participants allocated greater attentional focus to these locations in anticipation of the search. These results suggest that anticipatory attentional deployment precedes the suppression of high-probability distractor locations after the onset of visual search.
DOI: 10.1162/jocn.a.61
Authors: Yinfei Zhou, Lishuang Wang, Xinyu Li, Jan Theeuwes, Benchi Wang
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Award: G3351367923
OpenAlex ID: W4411331829