still bound to previous responses, suggesting they were encoded.

Check it out:
doi.org/10.1037/xhp0...

@apajournals.bsky.social

2/2

Check out the paper here 👇
doi.org/10.1037/xlm0...

#Visualsearch, #Attention, #Sequantialeffects, #Intertrialpriming

@apajournals.bsky.social

8/

These results suggest that we need to modify the current view of the bias towards the previous target location.

Crucially, it suggests that this bias isn't maladaptive in dynamic environments, as long as we know what we are about to do next.
7/

We conclude that the attentional bias toward the previous target location is flexible but proactive - you need to know your next task to reduce it.
We propose two possible mechanisms for these findings: proactive attenuation and proactive retrieval (details in the paper!).
6/

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!

5/

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..

/4

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.

3/

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.

2/