Learned oculomotor avoidance during strong target guidance

Visual attention is guided toward behaviorally-relevant objects by target ‘templates’ stored in visual memory. Visual attention also is guided away from nontarget distractors by learned distractor rejection. In a series of visual search experiments, I asked if learned distractor rejection operated while attention was simultaneously guided by a target template. Participants performed a visual search in two-color, spatially unsegregated displays where I manipulated attentional guidance by both target templates and consistent nontarget distractors. I observed faster mean response times to the target when a consistent nontarget distractor was present than when it was absent—the hallmark of learned distractor rejection—despite the use of strong target guidance. Then, I tested between two competing mechanisms to explain learned distractor rejection. Does visual attention learn to globally deprioritize the consistent distractor feature prior to search? Or, does visual attention react to and inhibit the consistent distractor feature within the local context of a search? Using eye tracking I found strong support for global deprioritization – participants avoided fixating the consistent distractor more than any variable distractor. Moreover, when a consistent distractor was fixated, participants more rapidly disengaged compared to other distractors. Thus, visual attention adopted a distractor-related control setting to avoid the consistent distractor whenever possible, but when the distractor was selected, it was rapidly disengaged – I term this pattern learned oculomotor avoidance. Learned oculomotor avoidance operates alongside guidance from a target template, indicating that theories of visual attention should incorporate guidance by both target templates and learned nontargets.