Learning to overcome distraction

When driving, maintaining attention on task-relevant items, such as other cars on the road, is critical for avoiding dangerous events. Attention researchers posit that maintaining attention on task-relevant items depends solely on our ability to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant items. For instance, when we can easily discriminate between relevant items, such as cars, and irrelevant items, such as billboards, we selectively attend the relevant items. When we cannot discriminate between relevant and irrelevant items, we attend to both the relevant and irrelevant items. Here, I test whether target discriminability is sufficient for preventing distraction of if we also must learn to ignore conspicuous items. I find that even when participants can easily discriminate between relevant and irrelevant items, participants must learn to ignore conspicuous items. Without this learning, the conspicuous items distract participants. I call this learned distractor rejection. I go on to investigate how participants maintain learned distractor rejection. I find that the learned ability to ignore conspicuous distractors persists over extended delays, demonstrating that long-term memory systems support learned distractor rejection. These results indicate that our ability to maintain attention on task-relevant items not only depends on our ability to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant items, but also our learned ability to ignore conspicuous items and this learning persists over extended periods of time.