The Attention Habit II: How selection history shapes the strategic control of attention

The allocation of attention is now widely understood to reflect the joint influence of goal-directed, stimulus-driven, and selection history-driven mechanisms of control. The influence of selection history is often discussed in the context of the involuntary control of attention, competing with goal-directed influences. Here, we argue that selection history also influences voluntary, goal-directed mechanisms of control, shaping the manner in which intentional prioritization of stimuli occurs. In this respect, the habitual guidance of attention is not limited to mechanisms of priority assignment that operate without respect to observers' goals and intentions; rather, the goal-directed control of attention itself is sensitive to habit-like mechanisms of priority assignment. This has implications for how we characterize mechanisms of attentional control, blurring the distinction between goal-directed and selection history-driven influences and raising important questions concerning the degree to which the intentional control of attention is biased by prior learning.