Recently it has been shown that statistical learning of regularities presented in a display can bias attentional selection, such that attentional capture by salient objects is reduced by suppressing the location where these distractors are likely to appear. The role of attention in learning these contingencies is not immediately clear. Specifically, it is not known whether attention needs to be directed to the contingencies present in the display for learning to occur. In the current study we investigated whether participants can learn statistical regularities present in the environment even when these regularities are not relevant for the participant and are not part of their top-down goals. We used the additional singleton paradigm in which a color singleton was presented much more often in one location than in all other locations. We show that after being exposed to these regularities regarding the location of the color singleton during an unrelated task in which there are no targets nor distractors, participants showed a suppression effect from the previously learned contingencies when switching to a task in which they search for a target and suppress a distractor. We conclude that visual statistical learning can occur in the absence of top-down attention.

近来，已经显示出对显示器中呈现的规律性的统计学习会偏向注意力选择，从而通过抑制这些干扰物可能出现的位置来减少由显着物体引起的注意力捕获。注意在学习这些意外事件中的作用尚不清楚。具体地，未知是否需要关注显示器中存在的意外事件以学习发生。在当前的研究中，我们调查了参与者是否可以学习环境中存在的统计规律，即使这些规律与参与者无关，也不属于自上而下的目标。我们使用了附加的单例范式，其中在一个位置比在所有其他位置更频繁地显示颜色单例。我们表明，在没有目标也没有干扰因素的不相关任务中，暴露于这些关于颜色单调位置的规律之后，参与者在转向寻找任务的任务时，表现出了从先前学到的意外事件中获得的抑制作用。瞄准并压制干扰物。我们得出结论，视觉统计学习可以在没有自上而下的注意的情况下发生。