Justin Frandsen¹, Brian Anderson¹; ¹Texas A&M University

Statistical regularities between objects and their locations can guide attention during visual search through scenes, even when the objects lack semantic meaning. Previous work demonstrates that target-location associations can facilitate visual search; however, it is unclear if distractor regularities can develop in the same way. In the present study, participants completed a training task where they would search for a target shape while a critical distractor shape appeared in the scene. Four target shapes were each associated with one of three possible locations within the scene (floor, counter, or wall) where they would appear 75% of the trials on which they were encountered; similarly, four critical distractor shapes were also each given an association with one of the three regions, where they would appear 100% of the trials on which they were encountered. Each trial, participants were cued to search for one of the four possible targets and respond to the orientation of a small “T" appearing within the target. After their response, participants were given a post-search duration where they were able to freely explore the scene. In a subsequent test phase, participants continued with the same task, but the critical distractors became the targets and appeared in all possible regions equally, and the post-search period was removed. In the training phase, participants we faster to respond and were more likely to initially fixate the target when it appeared in its associated high-probability region. In the test phase, we found a reversal of this effect where participants were slower to respond and less likely to initially fixate the target when it appeared in its previous high-probability location, suggesting that participants learned to inhibit the processing of that shape in its associated location during training. Additionally, we found that amount of exploration predicts stronger inhibitory effects.