Attention is spontaneously biased toward regularities.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Zhao J
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3734864 | biostudies-literature | 2013 May
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Attention is spontaneously biased toward regularities.
Zhao Jiaying J Al-Aidroos Naseem N Turk-Browne Nicholas B NB
Psychological science 20130404 5
Knowledge about regularities in the environment can be used to facilitate perception, memory, and language acquisition. Given this usefulness, we hypothesized that statistically structured sources of information receive attentional priority over noisier sources, independent of their intrinsic salience or goal relevance. We report three experiments that support this hypothesis. Experiment 1 shows that regularities bias spatial attention: Visual search was facilitated at a location containing temp ...[more]
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