Flexibility in Spatial Attention before and after Practice

These experiments used spatial probes to measure how spatial attention is allocated across the visual field during search for a target letter in an eight-letter array. There were three main findings: Attentional strength is flexibly adjusted according to the confusability between target and distractors. Distractor locations near the target receive more inhibition than those farther from the target, indicating that the nearby distractors interfere more with target identification. Despite the fact that consistent practice improves search rate, it does not diminish the strength of spatial attention in this task.