Citation

Jiang YV, Swallow KM, Won BY, Cistera JD, Rosenbaum GM. Atten. Percept. Psychophys. 2014; 77(1): 50-66.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, S251 Elliott Hall, 75 East River Road, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA, jiang166@umn.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.3758/s13414-014-0747-7

PMID

25113853

Abstract

Statistical regularities in our environment enhance perception and modulate the allocation of spatial attention. Surprisingly little is known about how learning-induced changes in spatial attention transfer across tasks. In this study, we investigated whether a spatial attentional bias learned in one task transfers to another. Most of the experiments began with a training phase in which a search target was more likely to be located in one quadrant of the screen than in the other quadrants. An attentional bias toward the high-probability quadrant developed during training (probability cuing). In a subsequent, testing phase, the target's location distribution became random. In addition, the training and testing phases were based on different tasks. Probability cuing did not transfer between visual search and a foraging-like task. However, it did transfer between various types of visual search tasks that differed in stimuli and difficulty. These data suggest that different visual search tasks share a common and transferrable learned attentional bias. However, this bias is not shared by high-level, decision-making tasks such as foraging.

Language: en