Recent studies using the additional singleton paradigm have shown that regularities in distractor locations can cause biases in the spatial priority map, such that attentional capture by salient singletons is reduced for locations that are likely to contain distractors. It has been suggested that this type of suppression is proactive (i.e., occurring before display onset). The current study replicated the original findings using an online version of the task. To further assess the suppression of high-probability locations, we employed a congruence manipulation similar to the traditional flanker effect, where distractors could be either congruent or incongruent with the response to the target. Experiment 1 shows that through statistical learning distractor suppression reduces the interference from incongruent distractors, as participants made less errors in high-probability versus low-probability conditions. In Experiment 2, participants were forced to search for a specific target feature (the so-called feature-search mode), which is assumed to allow participants to ignore distractors in a top-down manner. Yet even when this “top-down” search mode was employed, there was still a congruence effect when the distractor singleton was presented at the low-probability but not at the high-probability location. The absence, but not reversal, of a congruence effect at the high-probability location also further indicates that this distractor suppression mechanism is proactive. The results indicate that regardless of the search mode used, there is suppression of the high-probability location indicating that this location competes less for attention within the spatial priority map than all other locations.

最近使用附加单例范例的研究表明，干扰物位置的规律性可能会导致空间优先级图中的偏差，使得对于可能包含干扰物的位置，显着单例的注意力捕获会减少。有人建议这种类型的抑制是主动的（即，在显示开始之前发生）。当前的研究使用该任务的在线版本复制了最初的发现。为了进一步评估对高概率位置的抑制，我们采用了类似于传统侧翼效应的一致性操作，其中干扰因素可能与对目标的响应一致或不一致。实验 1 表明，通过统计学习干扰项抑制可以减少不一致干扰项的干扰，因为参与者在高概率条件下犯的错误比低概率条件下犯的错误更少。在实验2中，参与者被迫搜索特定的目标特征（所谓的特征搜索模式），假设该模式允许参与者以自上而下的方式忽略干扰因素。然而，即使采用这种“自上而下”的搜索模式，当干扰单例出现在低概率位置而不是高概率位置时，仍然存在一致性效应。在高概率位置处不存在一致性效应，但没有逆转，也进一步表明这种干扰抑制机制是主动的。结果表明，无论使用何种搜索模式，都存在对高概率位置的抑制，表明该位置在空间优先级图中对注意力的竞争比所有其他位置要少。