Learned relevance of a distracting cue can influence feature interference errors

Previous research has shown that attention can be guided via past experiences and learned regularities of target and/or distractor location. It has also been suggested that expectations surrounding salient distractors can potentially make them easier to suppress, thereby improving performance. Here, we ask: could the learned relevance of a distracting cue affect our ability to suppress it and protect against feature interference errors? Participants performed a delayed estimation task reporting the color of a target item, with a salient distractor cue appearing at a nontarget item's location on some trials. Critically, the experiment was split into two contexts presented in separate halves of the experiment, which differed based on whether the target and distracting cue could appear at the same location. In the "0 percent match" context, none of the trials had the salient cue appear at the target location; i.e., no 'valid' trials; whereas in the "50 percent match" context, 50 percent of distractor-present trials had the salient cue appear at the target location, increasing its potential relevance. We used a probabilistic mixture model to estimate generic performance measures (guess rate and standard deviation) as well as feature interference measures (swap rate and mean shift) for each condition. We found a significant difference in swap rates (misreporting the color of the item at the salient distractor location instead of the target color) between the two contexts depended on the order they were experienced. These results suggest that the learned relevance of a distractor cue can affect how likely participants were to be captured by a salient distractor and its resulting impact on target feature perception, and that statistical regularities relating to the relevance of salient items can affect the perception and encoding of stimulus features.