Claire Choi¹, Daniel Thayer², Tommy Sprague³; ¹UCSB

Attention is often directed toward salient stimuli because they are behaviorally important. However, salient distractors can be suppressed when they occur predictably (e.g., Luck et al. 2020; Thayer et al. 2022). Notably, the more salient a stimulus is, the more effectively it is suppressed (Stilwell et al., 2023; Stilwell & Anderson, 2025). While this relationship has been demonstrated for basic visual features, it remains unclear whether similar learning mechanisms extend to complex information such as emotion. The present study investigated whether observers can suppress emotional distractors based on learned probabilities and whether this differs across emotions. Participants completed an additional singleton search task where they identified a target face and reported the orientation of a line superimposed on the target. The target was defined as a unique face identity among homogeneous faces. On some trials, an emotional face distractor was present, sharing the same identity but differing in expression (happy, angry, or fearful), which has been shown to effectively capture attention (Yiend, 2010). Three distractor probability conditions were implemented. In the fixed probability condition, the distractor emotion was always the same (e.g., always angry). In the random condition, the distractor had an equal probability for any emotion. In the mixed probability condition, one emotion appeared more frequently as the distractor (65% of trials). Participants were faster to identify the target when a high-probability emotional distractor was present compared to low-probability distractors, indicating learned suppression of emotional regularities. Suppression was emotion-specific: happy faces produced the strongest attentional capture in the absence of regularities and were also most effectively suppressed when regularities were present; fearful faces showed moderate effects; angry faces consistently captured attention regardless of regularity. These results suggest that suppression mechanisms extend to complex emotional stimuli and are influenced by the strength of attentional priority associated with specific emotions.