Generalization of Location Suppression
Date
2022-05
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
A person’s attentional priority is a concept frequently investigated by
researchers. Previously, it was assumed that individuals attend to information based on
a top-down versus bottom-up dichotomy. More recently, a further sophisticated
approach involving an integrated priority map has emerged. This map involves taking
in information from current goals, physical salience, and selection history to decide
where to direct one’s attention. Prior studies have examined a specific category of
selection history, known as suppression. Participants have been shown to possess the
ability to suppress certain irrelevant stimuli as a means of reaching the target faster
and more accurately. This suppression can take place based on a variety of
characteristics of the stimulus, including its visual characteristics or coordinates in
space. Specifically, research has shown that individuals are able to suppress a specific
location when a distractor appears frequently in that location. This paper investigates
whether these effects will generalize if the task changes, but the visual coordinates of
the arrays stay the same. Utilizing two separate tasks, we found that the trained
suppression that occurred in one task does not carry over into the second task.
Description
Keywords
Attentional priority, Attention suppression, Selection history