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Some irrelevant features of a previous target guide attention during search, but others don't.
Are they not encoded, or do they not guide attention?

In our new paper (with Nitzan Micher & Dominique Lamy), we show that features that didn't guide attention were...

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frequency, and task predictability.

Participants were biased to report letters from the previous target location - and visual context didn’t affect this bias at all. However, advance knowledge of the upcoming task strongly reduced it!

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So, we ran 4 experiments to test whether the bias toward previously selected locations is truly inflexible.
On each trial, participants either searched for a target or reported briefly shown letters—randomly intermixed (capture-probe paradigm).
Importantly, we manipulated visual context, task..

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But many environments are dynamic - like in the supermarket, where we move quickly from aisle to aisle (or virtual environments).

If this bias is inflexible, it would be maladaptive in such situations.

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Current theories see this bias as "primitive" – attending to a location automatically and inflexibly boosts its priority.

In most real-world cases that's adaptive because the environment is stable: a pilot needs to keep attending to the altitude gauge, which is fixed.

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🚨Proud to share our new paper in JEP:LMC (w/ Dominique Lamy)🚨

Attention is strongly biased towards recently selected locations, but while current theories assume this bias is inflexible, we show that it is actually flexible, but proactive.

A🧵:

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Excited to share our new chapter (w/ @ani-ramgir.bsky.social & Dominique Lamy) on the priority map!

We all use this concept, but how did it emerge? How are the factors that influence it organized? And what's missing? (hint: temporal dynamics)

Find out our answers here:
dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781...

#ISCOP is always fun. Thanks to everyone who dropped by!