Rethinking Attentional Habits

Abstract

Attentional habits acquired by visual statistical learning cause enduring biases toward specific locations. These habits, driven by recent search history, are thought to be independent of both goal-directed and stimulus-driven attentional mechanisms. This theoretical claim is based on three characteristics that these habits apparently exhibit, that is, they are inflexible, implicit, and efficient. We review methodological limitations in previous studies and briefly describe recent results that challenge this new framework. We conclude that it might be premature to assume that attentional habits are based on a special search history process that differs from the two traditionally recognized attentional mechanisms.