Going through the motions: Biasing of dynamic attentional templates

Attention must coordinate with memory to actively anticipate sensory input and guide action. Memory content may be biased away from veridical when it is functionally adaptive. So far, research has considered the biasing of still features in static displays. It is unknown whether the biasing of attentional templates can functionally adapt dynamic stimuli to facilitate search when targets and distractors compete within temporally extended contexts. Biasing of dynamic templates would require learning and modulatory mechanisms capable of abstracting over space and time to guide perception. Four experiments used a novel dynamic visual search task combined with a memory probe to test whether dynamic attentional templates can be biased. In Experiments 1-3, participants searched for a moving target among distractors that systematically moved either clockwise or counterclockwise relative to the target. On memory probe trials, participants recalled the target direction as biased away from the distractors. The distortion bias was adaptively changed (Experiment 2), grew over time (Experiment 2), and occurred even when motion direction was not the target-defining feature (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 manipulated the speed of targets and distractors to test the generalizability of the findings. Participants searched for a target of a given speed among faster or slower distractors. Memory probing revealed that participants remembered the target speed as biased away from that of distractors. Across different tasks, the magnitude of the biasing correlated positively with search performance. Our findings provide compelling evidence that dynamic stimulus attributes in attentional templates can become functionally biased when adaptive. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).