A Study Of The Impact Of Visual Statistical Learning On Value-driven Attention Capture

As an important window of human psychological process,selective attention has been a heat field of cognitive psychology research for decades.With constant debates about the selection mechanism of attention,the early theories mainly formed goal-driven attention and stimulus-driven attention.The former reflects the top-down cognitive processing mode,and the latter reflects the bottom-up cognitive processing mode.In recent years,selection history,as a newly proposed mechanism of attention selection,has gradually been accepted by researchers.It emphasizes the influence of previous attention deployment on the current attention selection.Its effects are beyond the scope of goal-driven and stimulus-driven interpretation.The main forms include visual statistical learning,value-driven attentional capture,intertrial priming,etc.Among them,the importance of visual statistical learning in selective attention has been discovered,which refers to the process by which people unconsciously extract environmental regularities to improve the efficiency of information selection and processing.However,whether visual statistical learning could regulate the process of value-driven attentional capture is unclear.This study focuses on the influence of visual statistical learning on value-driven attentional capture,aiming to explore whether the location regularities of target and value distractors could affect value-driven attention capture.This study included two experiments,based on the value-driven attentional capture paradigm of Anderson et al.(2011),and combining with the visual statistical learning paradigms of Wang and Theeuwes(2018),Failing and Theeuwes(2019).Both experiments included training and test phases.In the training phase,two specific stimuli connected with high and low values respectively through reward feedback,and they appeared in the test phase as distractors.In experiment 1,a location was designated as the high-probability location of target in test phase.By comparing the reaction times of the target appearing in the high and low-probability locations under the conditions of different value distractor,experiment 1aimed to investigate whether individuals can learn the location regularities of the target under the condition of the existence of value distractors.In experiment 2,two diagonal locations were designated.One was for the high probability location of high value distractor,and the other was for the high probability location of low value distractor.By comparing the reaction times of high and low-value distractors appearing in different locations,experiment 2 aimed to investigate whether individuals can suppress the attentional capture of value distractors through visual statistical learning.The conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)The location regularities manipulation of the target and the value distractors both could influence value-driven attention capture.The former is manifested as the search facilitation effect on the high-probability location of the target,and the latter is manifested as the attention suppression on the high-probability locations of the value distractors.(2)The form of distractor attention suppression caused by visual statistical learning is“all-or-none”.(3)Visual statistical learning usually works in an implicit and undetected way.Therefore,this study proves that visual statistical learning can indeed influence valuedriven attentional capture,and further verifies the signal suppression hypothesis.It also has potential application value on industrial design and marketing.