Passive exposure attenuates distraction during visual search

Distractions are ubiquitous in our sensory environments. How do we keep them from capturing attention? Existing research has focused primarily on mechanisms of strategic control or statistical learning, both of which require knowledge (explicit or implicit) of what features belong to distractors before suppression occurs. Here, we test the hypothesis that task-free exposure to stimuli is sufficient to attenuate their effect as distractors later on. In 3 experiments, subjects were exposed to either colored or achromatic circles on "circle displays" interleaved with "target search displays." Later, new distractors were introduced into the search displays using colors from the circle displays. We consistently found that passively viewed colors produced less interference when introduced as new visual search distractors. We conclude that learning during passive exposure was due to habituation mechanisms that attenuate sensory responsivity to recurring stimuli, allowing attention to operate more efficiently to select task-relevant targets or novel stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).