The Location Independence of Learned Attentional Flexibility

Individuals can adjust their shift readiness, known as attentional flexibility, according to the statistical structure of the environment. However, the extent to which these modulations in attentional flexibility are associated with a global readiness to shift attention to any location versus an anticipated shift to a single location remains unknown. Across two experiments, participants shifted attention among three rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) streams of alphanumeric characters in response to embedded visual cues and made button presses in response to targets at the cued location. We manipulated the likelihood that participants would receive a cue that signaled a shift between two of the streams across blocks of trials. The likelihood of a cued shift of attention to the third location was held constant across all blocks. Participants demonstrated smaller target detection shift costs (Experiments 1 and 2) and shorter saccade latencies (Experiment 1) when the overall likelihood of shifting was high than when the overall shift likelihood was low. Critically, we observed evidence of both global shift readiness and location-specific shift readiness in both experiments such that participants shifted attention to the most-likely-to-be cued location the fastest, but still demonstrated a difference in the time to shift attention to the unlikely location according to the overall shift likelihood. Our findings provide evidence that moment-by-moment changes in attentional flexibility are not limited to an expectation to shift to a single location, but rather reflect, in part, a location-independent state of control.