Abstract
The present study explored whether multiple attentional control settings incidentally established are selectively, flexibly adapted depending on context. In the experiment, the modified contingent attentional capture paradigm was used. At the beginning of a trial, two placeholders were presented on either side of a central fixation. The shape of the central fixation and two placeholders was the same throughout a given trial, and was randomly changed between circle and square across trials. In the cue display, a red or green cue briefly (50ms) appeared at a randomly selected placeholder. In the search display shown immediately after the cue display, a search target defined by identity of a letter (Z and N) and a distractor letter (X, M, T, and V) were presented inside of the placeholders. Also, in the search display, the target letter and its placeholder were colored red or green, and the distractor letter and its placeholder were colored in the other. Crucially, in the training session, the color of the target letter and its placeholder were always red (green) when the shape of the fixation and placeholders were square (circle). But, this relationship was removed in the testing session, which was the only difference between the training and testing sessions. The results showed that during both the beginning of the testing session and the end of the training session, a red (green) cue, compared to a green (red) cue, captured attention more under the square (circle) context, suggesting that finely tuned (feature-based) attentional control settings established via statistical learning can be selectively, flexibly driven by context.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017