No evidence for spatial suppression due to across-trial distractor learning in visual search

Previous studies have shown that during visual search, participants are able to implicitly learn across-trial regularities regarding target locations and use these to improve search performance. The present study asks whether such across-trial visual statistical learning also extends to the location of salient distractors. In Experiments 1 and 2, distractor regularities were paired so that a specific distractor location was 100% predictive of another specific distractor location on the next trial. Unlike previous findings that employed target regularities, the current results show no difference in search times between predictable and unpredictable trials. In Experiments 3-5 the distractor location was presented in a structured order (a sequence) for one group of participants, while it was presented randomly for the other group. Again, there was no learning effect of the across-trial regularities regarding the salient distractor locations. Across five experiments, we demonstrated that participants were unable to exploit across-trial spatial regularities regarding the salient distractors. These findings point to important boundary conditions for the modulation of visual attention by statistical regularities and they highlight the need to differentiate between different types of statistical regularities.