Habituation to Visual Onsets is Affected by Local and Global Distractors Rate

Recent findings demonstrate that habituation of capture is stronger where onset distractors are frequent and weaker where they are rare, thus showing that habituation to onsets has a spatial selective nature. However, a debated question is whether habituation at a specific location is exclusively determined by the distractors’ local rate, or whether instead local habituation is also affected by the global rate of the distractors, which may occur also at other locations. Here, we report the results from a between-participants experiment involving three groups of participants exposed to visual onsets during a visual search task. In two groups, onsets appeared at a single location with a high 60% rate or a low 15% rate, respectively, whereas in a third group, distractors could appear in four distinct locations with the same 15% local rate, leading to a 60% global rate. Our results confirmed that locally, habituation of capture was stronger the higher the distractors rate. However, the key finding was that we found a clear and robust modulation of the global distractors rate on the local habituation level. Taken together, our results unambiguously show that habituation has both a spatially selective and a spatially nonselective nature.