Do we unconsciously learn to ignore a frequent distractor colour?
People learned to ignore a distractor in its most frequent colour, but the effect was small and short-lived, and noticing the pattern actually made it weaker.
Source
Is Statistical Learning of a Salient Distractor's Color Implicit, Inflexible and Distinct From Inter-Trial Priming?
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Online additional-singleton visual search task: a learning phase where one distractor colour was far more frequent, then an extinction phase with equal colour frequencies; participants randomly assigned to be informed (and tested for awareness) before extinction or after it.
- N
- N=160 · 160 online participants: 82 in the informed (early awareness test) group and 78 in the uninformed (late awareness test) group.
- Population
- Adults aged 18-35 with English as their first language, recruited through Prolific.
- Outcome
- Search reaction time and accuracy for high- vs. low-probability distractor colours (colour-suppression effect) in learning and extinction phases; percentage estimates of how often each distractor colour appeared.
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What they did
160 online participants searched for an odd shape among six items while one item was sometimes a salient colour singleton distractor. During the learning phase the distractor appeared in one high-probability colour on 65% of distractor trials and in each of four other colours on 8.75%; in the following extinction phase all colours were equally likely. Half the participants were asked to estimate colour percentages immediately after learning and were then told that the imbalance would stop, while the other half were tested for awareness only at the end and never told. The study was pre-registered.
What they found
During learning, search was 23ms faster when the distractor had the high-probability colour, a colour-suppression effect of moderate size. Part of this reflected short-term priming from the previous trial, and in the extinction phase the reaction-time effect disappeared, leaving only a tiny accuracy benefit of no more than 1%. People tested right after learning estimated the frequent colour at 29% versus 18% for those tested after extinction, so awareness was underestimated by late testing. Crucially, in the informed group, people who were more aware of the frequent colour showed less suppression, suggesting awareness works against the learned bias rather than producing it.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because the learned bias vanished almost immediately in extinction, the study could not properly test whether people can deliberately switch it off; the informed vs. uninformed difference was only a non-significant trend. The findings concern distractor colour in a task where participants search for a known odd shape, and the authors note that learning of distractor location or in other search modes may behave differently. Testing was online with uncontrolled viewing conditions and no eye tracking, and a non-pre-registered rule automatically replaced low-performing participants. The negative awareness-suppression correlation is correlational and appeared only in the early-test group.
Key terms
- Statistical learning
- Picking up regularities in the environment, such as which features occur most often, through repeated exposure rather than instruction.
- Additional singleton paradigm
- A visual search task in which people look for a shape singleton while a uniquely coloured distractor, which captures attention, is sometimes present.
- Inter-trial priming
- A short-term benefit when a feature, such as distractor colour, repeats from one trial to the next.
- Extinction phase
- A phase after learning in which the statistical regularity is removed, used to test whether the learned bias persists.
- Cued distraction (attentional white bear)
- The finding that knowing about or trying to ignore a specific distractor can make it more distracting.
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Quiz yourself
During the learning phase, what did the high-probability distractor colour do to search times?
Common questions
If awareness reduced suppression, how can learning be called implicit?
Because awareness and learning pushed in opposite directions: noticing the frequent colour increased attention to it, while statistical learning decreased attention to it, so the learning cannot depend on awareness.
Why does it matter when the awareness test is given?
Testing after the extinction phase, when the regularity is gone, dilutes memory for it; here late-tested participants were at chance, which would wrongly suggest nobody noticed anything.
Why use an extinction phase rather than just removing repeated-colour trials?
Priming effects can last several trials, so removing only immediate repeats may not remove them; in an extinction phase colours are equally likely, so any remaining bias cannot be explained by recent repeats.
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