Observers can adopt attentional control settings that regulate how their attention is drawn to salient stimuli in the environment. Do observers choose their attentional control settings voluntarily, or are they primed in a bottom-up manner based on the stimuli that the observer has recently attended and responded to (i.e., target-selection history)? In the present experiment, we tested these two accounts using a long-term memory attentional control settings paradigm, in which participants memorized images of 18 common visual objects, and then searched for those objects in a spatial blink task. Unbeknownst to participants, we manipulated priming by dividing the set of target objects into two subsets: nine objects appeared frequently as targets in the spatial blink task (frequently primed objects), and nine infrequently (infrequently primed objects). We assessed attentional capture by presenting these objects as distractors in the spatial blink task and measuring their effect on task accuracy. We found that both subsets of objects captured attention more than non-studied objects, and frequently primed objects did not capture attention more than infrequently primed objects. Moreover, a follow-up analysis revealed that all studied objects captured attention, even before those objects had appeared as targets in the spatial blink task. These findings suggest that priming through target-selection history plays little-to-no role in long-term memory attentional control settings. Rather, these findings align with a growing body of evidence that attentional control settings are primarily implemented through voluntary control.

观察者可以采用注意力控制设置，以调节他们如何吸引环境中的显着刺激。观察者是自愿选择自己的注意力控制设置，还是根据观察者最近参加并做出响应的刺激（即目标选择历史）以自下而上的方式准备？在本实验中，我们使用长期记忆注意控制设置范例对这两个帐户进行了测试，其中参与者存储了18个常见视觉对象的图像，然后在空间眨眼任务中搜索这些对象。对于参与者不为人知的是，我们通过将目标对象集分为两个子集来操纵启动：九个对象在空间眨眼任务中作为目标频繁出现（频繁启动的对象），而九个不频繁出现（不经常启动的对象）。我们通过在空间眨眼任务中将这些对象显示为干扰因素并评估其对任务准确性的影响，来评估注意力捕获。我们发现，对象的两个子集比未学习的对象更能吸引注意力，并且频繁启动的对象所吸引的注意力比不频繁启动的对象更多。此外，一项后续分析显示，所有研究对象都吸引了注意力，甚至在这些对象作为空间眨眼任务中的目标出现之前。这些发现表明，通过目标选择历史进行启动在长期记忆注意控制设置中几乎没有作用。而是，这些发现与越来越多的证据一致，即注意控制设置主要是通过自愿控制来实现的。