Distributed attention beats the down-side of statistical context learning in visual search

Abstract

Learnt target-distractor contexts guide visual search. However, updating a previously acquired target-distractor memory subsequent to a change of the target location has been found to be rather inefficient and slow. These results show that the imperviousness of contextual memory to incorporating relocated targets is particularly pronounced when observers adopt a narrow focus of attention to perform a rather difficult form-conjunction search task. By contrast, when they adopt a broad attentional distribution, context-based memories can be updated more readily because this mode promotes the acquisition of more global contextual representations that continue to provide effective cues even after target relocation.