# Learning alters salience and proactive attentional priority

## TL;DR

The study shows that learning can change how we perceive and process visual information by reducing the attention-grabbing power of irrelevant stimuli.

## Contribution

The novel contribution is demonstrating that learned suppression alters perceived saliency, impacting visual search through changes in initial salience calculations.

## Key findings

- Learned suppression makes items at suppressed locations appear less bright.
- A computational model shows that learned suppression reduces saliency in initial attentional calculations.
- This effect is similar to how endogenous and exogenous attention influence attentional processing.

## Abstract

The ability to ignore salient yet irrelevant stimuli is essential to accomplishing even simple tasks. Previous research has shown that observers are better able to suppress distracting stimuli via experience; yet the precise mechanisms of this learned suppression is a subject of debate. The current study (n = 230) employed a psychophysical approach combined with computational modeling to examine how learned spatial suppression affects perception and performance. The results show that items presented at suppressed locations are perceived as less bright than those in non-suppressed areas, suggesting that learned suppression directly affects the perceived saliency of items. To determine how this saliency change affects visual search, a computational modeling approach was used to compare various models of attentional selection. This analysis favored a model in which learned suppression reduces the saliency of objects presented at suppressed locations in the initial salience calculation. Since the saliency of these items is reduced, they are less able to compete for attentional processing and capture attention less often.

This study shows that past experiences alter the basic processing of visual input, demonstrating that learning alters attentional processing in a similar way to what has previously been shown with endogenous and exogenous attention.