The Effects Of Selection History On Visual And Auditory Spatial Attention

Abstract

Past research has demonstrated implicit experience-driven effects on spatial attention in vision and audition. In particular, what and where an observer has attended in the past affects future attentional selection. For instance, attention while searching for an item is biased towards locations which contained recent targets—an effect called inter-trial location priming—as well as towards locations which contain targets more often than other regions over a span of time—an effect called location probability learning. In this dissertation, I present three studies investigating selection history effects and how they differ from the better-understood goal-driven form of attention. The first two studies investigate the relationship between spatial selection history and top-down attention during visual search. Study 1 investigated how attending to spatial locations during a visual search task for letters affected a secondary memory task for scenes presented underneath the search array. Implicit location probability learning and goal-driven attention both affected search performance, but only goal-driven attention affected memory for scenes at attended locations. This suggests that implicitly learned probability learning has task-specific effects on attention, while goal-driven attention has task-general effects. Study 2 showed that, unlike goal-driven attention, implicit location probability learning causes shifts of visuospatial attention only after search stimuli appear, not in anticipation of stimulus onset. Study 3 investigated short-term and long-term auditory selection history effects, finding long-term location probability learning but a striking lack of short-term inter-trial location priming. Taken together, this dissertation provides evidence for differences in the implementation of goal-driven and implicitly learned spatial attention that, while present in both vision and audition, manifest in modality-specific ways.