Visual attention can be tuned to specific features to aid in visual search. The way in which these search strategies are established and maintained is flexible, reflecting goal-directed attentional control, but can exert a persistent effect on selection that remains even when these strategies are no longer advantageous, reflecting an attentional bias driven by selection history. Apart from feature-specific search, recent studies have shown that attention can be tuned to target-nontarget relationships. Here we tested whether a relational search strategy continues to bias attention in a subsequent task, where the relationally better color and former target color both serve as distractors (Experiment 1) or as potential targets (Experiment 2). We demonstrate that a relational bias can persist in a subsequent task in which color serves as a task-irrelevant feature, both impairing and facilitating visual search performance. Our findings extend our understanding of the relational account of attentional control and the nature of selection history effects on attention.

视觉注意力可以调整到特定功能以帮助视觉搜索。这些搜索策略的建立和维护方式是灵活的，反映了目标导向的注意力控制，但即使这些策略不再有利，也可以对选择产生持久的影响，反映了由选择历史驱动的注意力偏差。除了特定特征的搜索之外，最近的研究表明，注意力可以调整到目标与非目标的关系。在这里，我们测试了关系搜索策略是否继续在后续任务中偏向注意力，其中关系更好的颜色和以前的目标颜色都充当干扰项（实验 1）或潜在目标（实验 2）。我们证明，关系偏差可以在后续任务中持续存在，其中颜色作为与任务无关的特征，既损害又促进视觉搜索性能。我们的研究结果扩展了我们对注意力控制的关系解释和选择历史对注意力影响的本质的理解。