Integrated effects of top-down attention and statistical learning during visual search: An EEG study

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate how the competition between visual elements is solved by top-down and/or statistical learning (SL) attentional control (AC) mechanisms when active together. We hypothesized that the “winner” element that will undergo further processing is selected either by one AC mechanism that prevails over the other, or by the joint activity of both mechanisms. To test these hypotheses, we conducted a visual search experiment that combined an endogenous cueing protocol (valid vs. neutral cue) and an imbalance of target frequency distribution across locations (high- vs. low-frequency location). The unique and combined effects of top-down control and SL mechanisms were measured on behaviour and amplitudes of three evoked-response potential (ERP) components (i.e., N2pc, P1, CNV) related to attentional processing. Our behavioural results showed better performance for validly cued targets and for targets in the high-frequency location. The two factors were found to interact, so that SL effects emerged only in the absence of top-down guidance. Whereas the CNV and P1 only displayed a main effect of cueing, for the N2pc we observed an interaction between cueing and SL, revealing a cueing effect for targets in the low-frequency condition, but not in the high-frequency condition. Thus, our data support the view that top-down control and SL work in a conjoint, integrated manner during target selection. In particular, SL mechanisms are reduced or even absent when a fully reliable top-down guidance of attention is at play.

Transfer of statistical learning between tasks.

“…A study by Britton and Anderson (2020) examined whether learned spatial suppression established within the additional singleton paradigm transferred to a modified version of the spatial cueing paradigm, wherein a spatial cue predicted the location of an upcoming target character at chance level. The absence of transfer, as indexed via the cuing effect, observed in that study may not be surprising given that top-down attention generated by the cue arguably overrides any attentional bias implemented by statistical learning (Dolci et al, 2023), leaving it unclear whether suppression learned in one task remains in place in a different task setting. Nevertheless, there is reason to assume that this may be the case, as probability cueing studies (cf., Geng & Behrmann, 2002) have shown that learned facilitation does transfer between tasks.…”