Abstract
Contemporary theories of attentional control state that information can be prioritized based on selection history (Awh et al., 2012). Even though theories agree that selection history can impact representations of spatial location, which in turn helps guide attention, there remains disagreement on whether non-spatial features (e.g., color) are modulated in a similar way. While previous work has demonstrated color suppression using visual search tasks (Stilwell et al., 2019), it is possible that features were stored as templates to identify locations for suppression. Here, we sought to rule out this possibility by testing whether similar suppression of a learned distractor color can occur for spatially-overlapping visual stimuli. On a given trial, each of two stimuli (line arrays) was tilted either left or right of vertical and was presented in one of four distinct colors. Subjects performed a speeded report of the orientation of the ‘target’ array with the most lines. Critically, the distractor array was regularly one color (65% of trials), and this regular distractor array was never the color of the target array, which allowed for this color to be learned for suppression. In two experiments (N=24), responses to the target array were fastest when the distractor array was in the high-probability color, suggesting participants learned to suppress the distractor color. Additionally, to determine whether this benefit is due to inter-trial priming or long-term learning, feature regularities were removed in the last six blocks. For these experiments, the learned distractor color either never (E1), or with an equal probability (E2), appeared in the target array. The learned color continued to benefit speeded target identification (E1), but slowed target identification (E2) when presented in the target array. Together these results support the conclusion that learned suppression of feature-based regularities modulate target detection performance and persist over time.