Jan Theeuwes

• PhD
• Head of Department at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Statistical learning enables individuals to suppress distracting but salient information, yet the mechanisms underlying this suppression remain unclear. While some suggest that suppression is proactive, occurring without first attending to distractor locations, others argue that it is reactive, requiring covert attention toward the distractor locat...

Stimuli that reliably predict reward can capture attention. Value‑Modulated Attentional Capture (VMAC) is typically viewed as independent of task goals or physical salience, arising from Pavlovian learning. However, recent evidence suggests that the awareness of the stimulus‑reward contingency may be necessary during the acquisition of such attenti...

Through experience, humans can learn to suppress locations that frequently contain distracting stimuli. However, the neural mechanism underlying learned suppression remains largely unknown. In this study, we combined steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEPs) with event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the mechanism behind statistical...

Avoiding distraction by salient yet irrelevant stimuli is critical when accomplishing daily tasks. One possible mechanism to accomplish this is by suppressing stimuli that may be distracting such that they no longer compete for attention. While the behavioral benefits of distractor suppression are well established, its neural underpinnings are not...

Acting intentionally requires the integration of perceptual with action information in a common representational format. In the action control literature, this integrated representation is often called event file and is measured in so-called stimulus-response binding effects. These effects allow us to measure the strength of this shared representat...

Navigating visually complex environments requires focusing on relevant information while filtering out (salient) distractions. The signal suppression hypothesis posits that salient stimuli generate an automatic saliency signal that captures attention unless overridden by learned suppression mechanisms. In support of this, ERP studies have demonstra...

Attentional capture by an irrelevant salient distractor is attenuated when the distractor appears more frequently in one location, suggesting learned suppression of that location. However, it remains unclear whether suppression is proactive (before attention is directed) or reactive (after attention is allocated). Here, we investigated this using a...

This study demonstrates that even objects generating acute fear through shock conditioning can be attentionally suppressed. Participants searched for shapes while a color singleton distractor was presented. In a preconditioning phase, participants learned to suppress a color singleton distractor frequently appearing in a specific location. Followin...

Avoiding distraction by salient yet irrelevant stimuli is critical when accomplishing daily tasks. One possible mechanism to accomplish this is by suppressing stimuli that may be distracting such that they no longer compete for attention. While the behavioral benefits of distractor suppression are well-established, its neural underpinnings are not...

Attentional capture by an irrelevant salient distractor is attenuated when the distractor is presented more frequently in one location compared to other locations, suggesting that people learn to suppress an irrelevant salient location. However, to date it is unclear whether this suppression is proactive, applied before attention has been directed...

In an auditory statistical learning paradigm, listeners learn to partition a continuous stream of syllables by discovering the repeating syllable patterns that constitute the speech stream. Here, we ask whether auditory statistical learning benefits from spaced exposure compared with massed exposure. In a longitudinal online study on Prolific, we e...

In previous studies, it was established that individuals can implicitly learn spatiotemporal regularities related to how the distribution of target locations unfolds across the time course of a single trial. However, these regularities were tied to the appearance of salient targets that are known to capture attention in a bottom-up way. The current...

Eye movements in daily life occur in rapid succession and often without a predefined goal. Using a free viewing task, we examined how fixation duration prior to a saccade correlates to visual saliency and neuronal activity in the superior colliculus (SC) at the saccade goal. Rhesus monkeys (three male) watched videos of natural, dynamic, scenes whi...

Avoiding distraction by salient yet irrelevant stimuli is critical when accomplishing daily tasks. One possible mechanism to accomplish this is by suppressing stimuli that may be distracting such that they no longer compete for attention. While the behavioral benefits of distractor suppression are well-established, its neural underpinnings are not...

Avoiding distraction by salient yet irrelevant stimuli is critical when accomplishing daily tasks. One possible mechanism to accomplish this is by suppressing stimuli that may be distracting such that they no longer compete for attention. While the behavioral benefits of distractor suppression are well-established, its neural underpinnings are not...

Objects that typically induce fear capture attention in an automatic, involuntary manner, particularly for individuals fearful of such objects. This study investigates whether attention to these objects can be attenuated through statistical learning. Participants searched for shapes while occasionally being distracted by images of leaves, which app...

Statistical learning is a person’s ability to automatically learn environmental regularities through passive exposure. Since the earliest studies of statistical learning in infants, it has been debated exactly how “passive” this learning can be (i.e., whether attention is needed for learning to occur). In Experiment 1 of the current study, particip...

Children learn about art by actively engaging with their surroundings. This makes museums potentially rich environments for learning and development. Yet, the descriptions of paintings on show are usually written for adults rather than younger visitors. This study uses mobile eye tracking to examine how painting descriptions tailored for children i...

The ability to ignore salient yet irrelevant stimuli is essential to accomplish even simple tasks. Previous research has shown that observers are better able to suppress distracting items via experience; yet how this learned suppression is achieved is largely unknown. The current study employed a psychophysical approach combined with computational...

Rapid attentional capture is shaped by experiences of reward uncertainty: in a visual search task, distractor stimuli that signal uncertain rewards are more likely to capture attention than stimuli that provide diagnostic information about upcoming reward. This pattern of uncertainty-modulated attentional capture (UMAC) runs counter to claims that...

The world around us is inherently structured and often repetitive. Research has shown that we can implicitly learn to prioritize relevant objects and locations while filtering out distracting information, creating an integrated priority map for attention allocation. The current study examines whether these attentional biases are tied to environment...

It is well known that attention is captured by salient objects or events. The notion that attention is attracted by salience information present in the visual field is also at the heart of many influential models of attention. These models typically posit a hierarchy of saliency, suggesting that attention progresses from the most to the least salie...

Recent evidence shows that observers are able to learn across-trial regularities as indicated by faster responses to targets whose location was predicted by the target’s location on the preceding trial. The present study investigated whether responding to both targets of the pair, as was the case in studies thus far, was needed for learning to occu...

email: J.Theeuwes@vu.nl 2 abstract The current review presents an integrated tripartite framework for understanding attentional control, emphasizing the interaction and competition among top-down, bottom-up, and selection-history influences. It focuses on attentional capture which refers to conditions in which salient objects or events receive atte...

Climate change poses an unprecedented challenge to humanity, and persuasive environmental communication is a crucial step for global leaders to counteract its consequences. Charismatic leaders are especially effective in communicating information. Interestingly, in recent years, there have been frequent incidences where charismatic leaders made inc...

Attentional capture by an irrelevant salient distractor is attenuated when the distractor appears more frequently in one location, suggesting learned suppression of that location. However, it remains unclear whether suppression is proactive (before attention is directed) or reactive (after attention is allocated). Here, we investigated this using a...

Attentional capture by an irrelevant salient distractor is attenuated when the distractor is presented more frequently in one location compared to other locations, suggesting that people learn to suppress an irrelevant salient location. However, to date it is unclear whether this suppression is proactive, applied before attention has been directed...

Recent studies have shown that observers can learn to suppress locations in the visual field with a high distractor probability. Here, we investigated whether this learned suppression resulting from a spatial distractor imbalance transfers to a completely different search task that does not contain any distractors. Observers performed the additiona...

Our prior experiences shape the way that we prioritize information from the environment for further processing, analysis, and action. We show in three experiments that this process of attentional prioritization is critically modulated by the degree of uncertainty in these previous experiences. Participants completed a visual search task in which th...

Through statistical learning, humans are able to extract temporal regularities, using the past to predict the future. Evidence suggests that learning relational structures makes it possible to anticipate the imminent future; yet, the neural dynamics of predicting the future and its time-course remain elusive. To examine whether future representatio...

Through statistical learning, humans are able to extract temporal regularities, using the past to predict the future. Evidence suggests that learning relational structures makes it possible to anticipate the imminent future; yet, the neural dynamics of predicting the future and its time-course remain elusive. To examine whether future representatio...

Attentional capture by an irrelevant salient distractor is attenuated when the distractor is presented more frequently in one location compared to other locations, suggesting that people learn to suppress an irrelevant salient location. However, to date it is unclear whether this suppression is proactive, applied before attention has been directed...

French translation of the paper "Looking at paintings in the Vincent Van Gogh Museum: Eye movement patterns of children and adults"

Avoiding distraction by salient yet irrelevant stimuli is critical when accomplishing daily tasks. One possible mechanism to accomplish this is by suppressing stimuli that may be distracting such that they no longer compete for attention. While the behavioral benefits of distractor suppression are well-established, its neural underpinnings are not...

Salient objects often capture our attention, serving as distractors and hindering our current goals. It remains unclear when and how salient distractors interact with our goals, and our knowledge on the neural mechanisms responsible for attentional capture is limited to a few brain regions recorded from non-human primates. Here we conducted a multi...

A large number of recent studies have demonstrated that efficient attentional selection depends to a large extent on the ability to extract regularities present in the environment. Through statistical learning, attentional selection is facilitated by directing attention to locations in space that were relevant in the past while suppressing location...

Our attention is influenced by past experiences, and recent studies have shown that individuals learn to extract statistical regularities in the environment, resulting in attentional suppression of locations that are likely to contain a distractor (high-probability location). However, little is known as to whether this learned suppression operates...

Statistical learning, the process of extracting regularities from the environment, is one of the most fundamental abilities playing an essential role in almost all aspects of human cognition. Previous studies have shown that attentional selection is biased toward locations that are likely to contain a target and away from locations that are likely...

Statistical learning is a person’s ability to automatically learn environmental regularities through passive exposure. Since the earliest studies of statistical learning in infants, it has been debated exactly how ‘passive’ this learning can be – i.e. whether attention is needed for learning to occur. In Experiment 1 of the current study, participa...

Through statistical learning, humans are able to extract temporal regularities, using the past to predict the future. Evidence suggests that learning relational structures makes it possible to anticipate the imminent future; yet, the neural dynamics of predicting the future and its time-course remain elusive. To examine whether future representatio...

Hypothesis-driven research rests on clearly articulated scientific theories. The building blocks for communicating these theories are scientific terms. Obviously, communication – and thus, scientific progress – is hampered if the meaning of these terms varies idiosyncratically across (sub)fields and even across individual researchers within the sam...

It is well established that attention can be sharpened through the process of statistical learning (e.g., visual search becomes faster when targets appear at high-relative-to-low probability locations). Although this process of statistically learned attentional enhancement differs behaviorally from the well-studied top–down and bottom–up forms of a...

Attention has been usefully thought of as organized in priority maps – putative maps of space where attentional priority is weighted across spatial regions in a winner-take-all competition for attentional deployment. Recent work has highlighted the influence of past experiences on the weighting of spatial priority – called selection history. Aside...

A series of recent studies has demonstrated that attentional selection is modulated by statistical regularities, even when they concern task-irrelevant stimuli. Irrelevant distractors presented more frequently at one location interfere less with search than distractors presented elsewhere. To account for this finding, it has been proposed that thro...

Through statistical learning, humans can learn to suppress visual areas that often contain distractors. Recent findings suggest that this form of learned suppression is insensitive to context, putting into question its real-life relevance. The current study presents a different picture: we show context-dependent learning of distractor-based regular...

With great pleasure I studied the commentaries of my esteemed colleagues to my opinion paper "The Attentional Capture Debate: When Can We avoid Salient Distractors and When Not?" (Theeuwes, 2023). I thought the comments were to-the-point and provocative and I believe that these kinds of exchanges will help the field to move forward in this debate....

There has been a long-standing debate concerning whether we are able to resist attention capture by salient distractors. The so-called "signal suppression hypothesis" of Gaspelin and Luck (2018) claimed to have resolved this debate. According to this view, salient stimuli "naturally attempt to capture attention", yet attention capture may be preven...

Although in many cases salient stimuli capture attention involuntarily, it has been proposed recently that under certain conditions, the bottom–up signal generated by such stimuli can be proactively suppressed. In support of this signal suppression hypothesis, ERP studies have demonstrated that salient stimuli that do not capture attention elicit a...

Where and what we attend is very much determined by what we have encountered in the past. Recent studies have shown that people learn to extract statistical regularities in the environment resulting in attentional suppression of locations that were likely to contain a distractor, effectively reducing the amount of attentional capture. Here, we aske...

It is assumed by the OB1-reader model that activated words are flexibly associated with spatial locations. Supporting this notion, recent studies show that readers can confuse the order of words. As word position coding is assumed to rely, among other things, on low-level visual cues, OB1 predicts that it must be harder to determine the order of wo...

Recent studies have shown that observers can learn to suppress a location that is most likely to contain a distractor. The current study investigates whether the statistically learned suppression is already in place, before, or implemented exactly at the moment participants expect the display to appear. Participants performed a visual search task i...

It has been well established that attention can be sharpened through the process of statistical learning - whereby visual search is optimally adapted to the spatial probabilities of a target in visual fields. Specifically, attentional processing becomes more efficient when targets appear at high relatively to low probability locations. Statisticall...

Research has recently shown that efficient selection relies on the implicit extraction of environmental regularities, known as statistical learning. Although this has been demonstrated for scenes, similar learning arguably also occurs for objects. To test this, we developed a paradigm that allowed us to track attentional priority at specific object...

Previous studies have shown that during visual search, participants are able to implicitly learn across-trial regularities regarding target locations and use these to improve search performance. The present study asks whether such across-trial visual statistical learning also extends to the location of salient distractors. In Experiments 1 and 2, d...

Although in many cases salient stimuli capture attention involuntarily, it has been proposed recently that under certain conditions the bottom-up signal generated by such stimuli can be proactively suppressed. In support of this signal suppression hypothesis, ERP studies have demonstrated that salient stimuli that do not capture attention elicit a...

Many studies have shown that statistical learning of target or distractor distributional regularities can bias attentional selection. A recent study demonstrated that participants could also extract spatiotemporal regularities that occurred across trials: participants were faster to find the target when its location was predicted by the target loca...

Adopting a cognitive and follower-centric approach to charismatic leadership, we hypothesized that followers show lower levels of cognitive effort, reflected in superficial processing of factually correct information when listening to and viewing a charismatic leader. We conducted two experiments, using a 2 (charismatic versus neutral) × 2 (female...

In dynamic environments, statistical learning of spatial and temporal regularities guides visual attention in space and time. In the current study, we explored whether and how combined spatiotemporal regularities regarding target events guide visual attention. In three experiments, participants performed the additional singleton task. They were ask...

Priority maps are winner-take-all neural mechanisms that are thought to guide the allocation of attention. Within these maps, attentional priority is coded as weights on a topographic representation of physical space. Research has shown that these weights are not just influenced by the current stimuli presented but also by selection episodes that o...

While the visual environment contains massive amounts of information, we should not and cannot pay attention to all events. Instead, we need to direct attention to those events that have proven to be important in the past and suppress those that were distracting and irrelevant. Experiences molded through a learning process enable us to extract and...

For decades, it has been assumed that when humans retrieve information from long-term memory (LTM), information need first to be brought back into working memory (WM). However, as WM capacity is limited, it is unclear what happens if information from LTM needs to be retrieved while WM is fully engaged? To address this question, observers had to ret...

It is well known that attentional selection is sensitive to the regularities presented in the display. In the current study we employed the additional singleton paradigm and systematically manipulated the probability that the target would be presented in one particular location within the display (probabilities of 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, and...

Distractor suppression refers to the ability to filter out distracting and task-irrelevant information. Distractor suppression is essential for survival and considered a key aspect of selective attention. Despite the recent and rapidly evolving literature on distractor suppression, we still know little about how the brain suppresses distracting inf...

The present study investigated how attentional selection is affected by simultaneous statistical learning of target and distractor regularities. Participants performed an additional singleton task in which the target singleton was presented more often in one location while the distractor singleton was presented more often in another location. On so...

Previous studies have shown that attention becomes biased toward those locations that frequently contain a target and is biased away from locations that have a high probability to contain a distractor. A recent study showed that participants also learned regularities that exist across trials: Participants were faster to find the singleton when its...

The present study investigated whether explicit knowledge and awareness regarding the regularities present in the display affects statistical learning (SL) in visual search. Participants performed the additional singleton paradigm in which a salient distractor was presented much more often in one location than in all other locations. Previous studi...

Salient distractors such as color singletons typically capture attention. Recent studies have shown that probabilistic expectations of color singletons' occurrence-even when their location and features are unpredictable-can eliminate attentional capture. Here we ask whether this effect, referred to as "second-order distractor suppression," (a) coul...

Existing research demonstrates different ways in which attentional prioritization of salient nontarget stimuli is shaped by prior experience: Reward learning renders signals of high-value outcomes more likely to capture attention than signals of low-value outcomes, whereas statistical learning can produce attentional suppression of the location in...

Distractor suppression refers to the ability to filter out distracting and task-irrelevant information. Distractor suppression is essential for survival and considered a key aspect of selective attention. Despite the recent and rapidly evolving literature on distractor suppression, we still know little about how distracting information is suppresse...

All banknotes have security features which are intended to help determine whether they are false or genuine. Typically , however, the general public has limited knowledge of where on a banknote these security features can be found. Here, we tested whether counterfeit detection can be improved with the help of salient elements, designed to guide bot...

Increasing evidence demonstrates that observers can learn the likely location of salient singleton distractors during visual search. To date, the reduced attentional capture at high-probability distractor locations has typically been examined using so called compound search, in which by design a target is always present. Here, we explored whether s...

The present study used perceptual sensitivity (d') to determine the spatial distribution of attention in displays in which participants have learned to suppress a location that is most likely to contain a distractor. Participants had to indicate whether a horizontal or a vertical line, which was shown only briefly before it was masked, was present...

In a review paper, Luck et al. [(2021). Progress toward resolving the attentional capture debate. Visual Cognition, 29(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2020.1848949] discussed multiple perspectives on the attentional capture debate. In response to this review paper, several commentaries were written. Here, I respond to these commentaries...

The present study investigates the flexibility of statistically learned distractor suppression between different contexts. Participants performed the additional singleton task searching for a unique shape, while ignoring a uniquely colored distractor. Crucially, we created two contexts within the experiments, and each context was assigned its own h...

With the arrival of new technologies more en-route traffic information sources have become available, especially in-car information sources. The aim of this study is to gain more insight into the effect of multiple, and possibly conflicting, sources of information on route choice and driver behaviour. In a driving simulator experiment, participants...

Distraction by a salient object can be reduced when we implicitly learn to suppress its most likely location. The current study investigated whether this suppression can also be tuned to the time at which the distractor is likely to appear. Participants performed the additional singleton task, in which they searched for a unique shape while a color...

In order to focus on objects of interest, humans must be able to avoid distraction by salient stimuli that are not relevant to the task at hand. Many recent studies have shown that through statistical learning we are able to suppress the location that is most likely to contain a salient distractor. Here we demonstrate a remarkable flexibility in at...

In 1995, Theeuwes and Godthelp published a paper called “self-explaining roads,” in which they argued for the development of a new concept for approaching safe road design. Since this publication, self-explaining roads (SER) became one of the leading principles in road design worldwide. The underlying notion is that roads should be designed in such...

Irrelevant salient objects may capture our attention and interfere with visual search. Recently, it was shown that distraction by a salient object is reduced when it is presented more frequently at one location than at other locations. The present study investigates whether this reduced distractor interference is the result of proactive spatial sup...