Abstract

The location probability learning effect refers to the phenomenon where spatial attention is biased towards a specific location, resulting in faster visual search, when a target appears frequently at that location (Jiang et al., 2013). This study aimed to investigate whether spatial attention is flexibly biased by temporal context in conjunction search. In Experiment 1, the target appeared with high frequency in two specific quadrants depending on the temporal context (300 ms / 1300 ms) after fixation. The results of Experiment 1 showed that spatial attention was biased towards the two high-frequency quadrants regardless of the temporal context. In Experiment 2, by reinforcing the temporal context, the target was presented from either the first or second search display depending on the context, and the results showed that context-specific spatial attention bias occurred. Experiment 3 reaffirmed the influence of the order to investigate specifically the effect sizes of the temporal order and duration confounded in Experiment 2. These results imply that the search display with temporal order information is used as a powerful temporal context in location probability learning, and provide new insights into the way temporal context operates in the human learning mechanism in dynamic environments where space and time coexist.