Learned relevance of a distracting cue can influence feature interference errors

Previous research has shown that attention can be guided via past experiences and learned regularities of target and/or distractor location. Here, we ask: could the learned relevance of a distracting cue affect our ability to suppress it and prevent feature interference errors? Participants reported the colour of a target item, while a salient distractor cue appeared on some trials. Critically, the experiment was split into two contexts, which differed based on whether the target and distracting cue could appear at the same location. We used a probabilistic mixture model to estimate feature report errors. We found a significant difference in swap rates (misreporting the colour at the salient distractor location instead of target colour) between the two contexts depending on the order they were experienced. These results suggest that the learned relevance of a distractor cue can affect how likely it is to capture attention and impact target feature perception.