Litian Chen^1,2 (l.chen2@vu.nl), Shichen Jia³, Caterina Fatato³, Freek van Ede^1,2, Heleen A. Slagter^1,2; ¹Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, ²Institute Brain and Behaviour Amsterdam, ³Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam

Both the allocation of attention to goal-relevant information and the inhibition of distracting information are fundamentally shaped by statistical learning. For instance, attention is automatically facilitated at locations where targets are likely to appear and inhibited at locations where distractors frequently occur. In the domain of target-location learning, the spatial reference frame in which this statistical learning operates appears to depend on awareness of the regularity: with explicit awareness, target location learning can be world-centered (allocentric), whereas without awareness, it remains viewer-dependent (egocentric). We and others recently extended this work by showing that implicit distractor-location learning similarly relies on a viewer-centered. Here, we investigated whether explicit distractor knowledge can similarly shift distractor-location learning to an allocentric reference frame. In six experiments (total n=167), participants performed an additional-singleton search task projected on a tabletop while standing. On each trial, they moved to a different side of the table, so that we could manipulate whether the high-probability target or distractor location was fixed in the world (allocentric) or stable relative to their viewpoint (egocentric). We replicated past findings that with explicit target knowledge, participants successfully learned where in the world targets likely occurred, while in the unaware condition, no target-location learning was observed in the world-centered frame. In contrast, distractor-location learning remained stubbornly viewer-centered, even with explicit knowledge. These findings reveal a clear dissociation between target selection and distractor inhibition: explicit knowledge enables world-centered learning – generalizing across viewpoints – when applied to goal-relevant information, while distractor inhibition remains viewpoint dependent, regardless of awareness. We posit that distractor inhibition may be more fundamentally anchored in immediate sensorimotor processing, guiding the agent on how not to attentionally sample the environment from their viewpoint.