Stability of individual differences in implicitly guided attention

Abstract

Daily activities often occur in familiar environments, affording us an opportunity to learn. Laboratory studies have shown that people readily acquire an implicit spatial preference for locations that frequently contained a search target in the past. These studies, however, have focused on group characteristics, downplaying the significance of individual differences. In a pre-registered study, we examined the stability of individual differences in two variants of an implicit location probability learning (LPL) task. We tested the possibility that individual differences were stable in variants that shared the same search process, but not in variants involving different search processes. In Experiment 1, participants performed alternating blocks of T-among-Ls and 5-among-2s search tasks. Unbeknownst to them, the search target appeared disproportionately often in one region of space; the high-probability regions differed between the two tasks. LPL transferred between the two tasks. In addition, individuals who showed greater LPL in the T-task also did so in the 5-task and vice versa. In Experiment 2, participants searched for either a camouflaged-T against background noise or a well-segmented T among well-segmented Ls. These two tasks produced task-specific learning that did not transfer between tasks. Moreover, individual differences in learning did not correlate between tasks. Thus, LPL is associated with stable individual differences across variants, but only when the variants share common search processes.