Acquisition of habitual visual attention and transfer to related tasks

Abstract

Extensive research has shown that statistical learning affects perception, attention, and action control; however, few studies have directly linked statistical learning with the formation of habits. Evidence that learning can induce a search habit has come from location probability learning, in which people prioritize locations frequently attended to in the past. Here, using an alternating training-testing procedure, we demonstrated that the initial attentional bias arises from short-term intertrial priming, whereas probability learning takes longer to emerge, first reaching significance in covert orienting (measured by reaction times) after about 48 training trials, and in overt orienting (measured by eye movements) after about 96 training trials. We further showed that location probability learning is persistent after training is discontinued, by transferring from a letter search task to a scene search task-emulating another characteristic feature of habits. By identifying the onset of probability learning and investigating its task specificity, this study provides evidence that probability cuing can induce habitual spatial attention.

Keywords: Eyetracking; Habitual attention; Probability cuing; Statistical learning; Visual search.

Figure 1

A pictorial representation of the design and stimuli used in the T and L letter search task. (A) It was equally probable for the target “T” to appear in all quadrants in trials 1–12, but more probable for the target to appear in a “rich”, high-probability quadrant in trials 13–36. This alternation occurred 10 times. (B) An image of a T and L task trial.

Figure 2

A pictorial representation of the design and stimuli used in the scene search task. (A) It was equally probable for the target (arrow) to appear in each of the four quadrants in all trials. (B) Two possible images of trials.

Figure 3

Results of the T-among-L search task depicting the average reaction time in locating the target stimulus in the high-probability quadrant and low-probability quadrants across blocks. 1 unbiased block = first 12 trials of each T-among-L search block (left). 1 biased block = last 24 trials of each T-among-L search block (right). Error bars show ±1 S.E. of the mean.

Figure 4

Eye-tracking results of the T-among-L search task depicting the proportion of first saccades that were directed toward the high-probability quadrant in biased and unbiased trials of the task. 0.25 is chance. Each experimental block contained 12 unbiased trials followed by 24 biased trials. Error bars show ±1 S.E. of the mean.

Figure 5

Left: Results of the scene search task depicting the average reaction time in locating the target stimulus (arrow) in the high-probability quadrant and low-probability quadrants of the T-among-L search task. Each half of the experiment contained 60 trials. Right: proportion of the first saccadic eye movement toward the high-probability quadrant. Chance is 0.25. Error bars show +1 S.E. of the mean.