Threat captures attention but does not affect learning of contextual regularities

ABSTRACT

Some of the stimulus features that guide visual attention are abstract properties of objects such as potential threat to one's survival, whereas others are complex configurations such as visual contexts that are learned through past experiences. The present study investigated the two functions that guide visual attention, threat detection and learning of contextual regularities, in visual search. Search arrays contained images of threat and non-threat objects, and their locations were fixed on some trials but random on other trials. Although they were irrelevant to the visual search task, threat objects facilitated attention capture and impaired attention disengagement. Search time improved for fixed configurations more than for random configurations, reflecting learning of visual contexts. Nevertheless, threat detection had little influence on learning of the contextual regularities. The results suggest that factors guiding visual attention are different from factors that influence learning to guide visual attention.

KEYWORDS:

• Threat detection
• visual search
• contextual learning
• attention capture
• attention capture
• implicit learning

Acknowledgements

The data were originally collected as part of the undergraduate dissertation project by the second author, which was supervised by the first author. The authors wish to thank two reviewers who provided valuable comments on earlier drafts.

ORCID

Motonori Yamaguchi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8405-9741

Additional information

Funding

The study was supported in part by the Research Incentive Fund (RIF) grant from Edge Hill University.