Dock H. Duncan^1,2, Norman Forschack³, Dirk van Moorselaar^1,2, Jan Theeuwes^1,2,4; ¹Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, ²Institute Brain and Behavior Amsterdam (iBBA), ³Wilhelm Wundt Institute for Psychology, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany, ⁴William James Center for Research, ISPA-Instituto Universitario, Lisbon, Portugal

Visual selection is influenced by our past experience. More specifically, through a process known as statistical learning, participants learn to respond faster to targets when presented at predictable locations while distractors interfere less with visual search when regularly encountered at the same location. While a great deal of recent research has focused on the extent that prior experience influences visual attention, the brain mechanisms by which our past experiences affects attentional selection is still elusive. Recent work has demonstrated that our prior experience modulates pre-stimulus excitability of suppressed or enhanced locations in space, possibly via transient changes in synaptic connectivity in the visual system. However, the precise location within the visual system where these changes occur and how early in visual processing these shifts manifest remain unclear. To address these questions, the present study employed steady state visually evoked potentials (SSVEP’s), a technique offering a straightforward measure of attentional processing with excellent temporal fidelity. Participants performed a modified version of the additional singleton task across two EEG sessions with counterbalanced distractor high probability locations. The search stimuli flickered on and off the screen at various high frequency rates, leading to frequency entrainment in the visual system and enabling the tracking of current attentional engagement. Preliminary results show that SSVEP’s can be effectively used to track the timecourse of attentional capture; revealing how selection differs in suppressed spatial field as opposed to unsuppressed fields and how this learned suppression changes the temporal character of attentional capture. SSVEP’s tied to neutral interstimulus placeholders additionally tracked how statistical learning alters pre-stimulus excitability, demonstrating how learned suppression exerts its influence proactively before stimulus onset.