An Eye-Tracking Study of Experience-Driven Attention and Transfer to Related Tasks

Abstract

Spatial attention is frequently influenced by previous experiences, often without explicit awareness. This influence of previous experiences on spatial attention can lead to statistical learning and the formation of habitual attention––the tendency to prioritize locations that were frequently attended to in the past. The present study evaluated whether habitual attention transfers from a relatively impoverished task to a more realistic task as a first step in exploring the real-world applications of trained statistical learning. We induced habitual attention by training participants with a simple visual search task, which involved searching for the letter T amongst many letter Ls. This task was interleaved with a more realistic visual search task, where participants searched for an arrow against a road scene. Consistent with previous research, participants acquired habitual attention within T-among-L search task. Analyses of first saccadic eye movement, but not reaction time, showed a short-term transfer of habitual attention between the T-among-L search task and the map search task. Keywords: habitual attention, statistical learning, probability cuing, visual search