Explicit Cueing Effects on Attention are Stable Across Days; Experience-Based Effects Are Not

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 16, 2024, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Natalia Khodayari¹, Aaron Patterson¹, Adrian Li¹, Howard Egeth¹, Susan Courtney¹; ¹Johns Hopkins University

In a previous experiment, we found that explicit cueing of a target location yields both internally-consistent (reliable) behavioral effects and test-retest reliability across days. These results suggest that attention driven by explicit cueing yields stable, trait-like, effects that are relatively immune to state changes across days (e.g. sleep quality) or selection history (e.g. priming). Here we tested whether experience-based attention also yields internally-reliable and consistent individual differences measures across days. Participants completed a statistical learning experiment where they learned the likely (frequent) location of the target shape-singleton in a four-item array; distractor color-singletons were sometimes present. Participants returned three to eight days later to complete a second session of the same experiment. We found that individual differences measures (reaction time and accuracy) of target frequency (infrequent - frequent target location) yielded internally-reliable individual differences measures in both sessions one and two, suggesting that participants had stable and consistent behavior within each experimental session. In contrast to our explicit-cueing results, however, we found that measures of the target frequency effect did not correlate across sessions, suggesting that participants’ experience-based behavior is reliable within days, but not across days. We additionally found that the effect of distractor presence (distractor present – absent) on reaction time and accuracy yielded both internally-reliable individual differences measures and test-retest reliability. Together, these results suggest that, whereas attention driven by explicit cueing and task rules is trait-like and less affected by changes in states, experience-based attention effects may be more sensitive to states that change across days.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Spatial