Abstract
Facing the ever-changing visual information in space, we are surprisingly good at searching for the goal-related events. Previous studies have shown that people are able to extract the implicit regularities occurring in space and time through statistical learning. In turn, visual attention was guided accordingly in an automatic and implicit way. The current study investigated whether and how the implicit spatiotemporal regularities guide visual attention. To this end, we conducted three experiments in which targets were presented at different moments in time at different locations. Following the presentation of a neutral fixation dot for either a short or long interval, participants were asked to search for a target stimulus with a unique shape among five non-target distractors and respond to the orientation of a line inside the target. Critically, the moment in time that the search display was presented was predictive of the target location. More specifically, the target was presented more frequently at one high probability location after a short interval and at another high probability location after a long interval. Regardless of the different temporal preparation effect due to an uniform (Experiment 1), exponential (Experiment 2), or anti-exponential (Experiment 3) distribution of intervals, participants performed better for two high probability locations relative to low probability locations. In addition, visual search efficiency was enhanced when the target appeared at a high probability location after its associated time interval than when it appeared after another interval. The observed effect can neither be explained by participants’ explicit knowledge of regularities nor by shot-lasting intertrial location priming. Altogether, the results indicate that visual attention is dynamically allocated towards the probable target location through statistical learning of spatiotemporal regularities.