Learning not to attend to distractors if the task is demanding: Constraints on the attentional white bear effect

Four experiments investigated the attentional white bear (AWB) effect, in which attention increases for an upcoming distractor, and identified two key factors that interact to determine when it occurs: learned attentional set and top-down attentional control. Participants do not show enhanced attention if they begin the experiment with trials that include distractors; the effect only appears in participants who start with a block of trials without distractors. The presence or absence of distractors induces participants to adopt an attentional set that they then maintain when the distractor condition changes. Furthermore, the enhanced attention is only eliminated in the distractor-first participants if the task has a high working memory load. With a low load, the distractor always receives enhanced attention, probably because it poses less competition for resources. The results suggest that participants normally adopt a "process-all" approach, but that top-down attentional control can overrule this approach by suppressing distractor attention if there appear to be insufficient attentional resources to process all the stimuli present. The results show that the AWB effect is subject to attentional control and that a processing strategy adopted as the task is being learned is likely to be maintained even when conditions change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).