Can Implicit Learning Occur Outside the Spotlight of Attention?

Over time people implicitly learn, for example, that if they follow the hallway from their bedroom, it will lead to the living room, which leads to the kitchen, and so forth. This type of learning is known as statistical learning (SL), which seems to occur outside of conscious awareness, but whether top-down spatial attention is needed for this learning to occur is still debated. Therefore, the current research aimed to test whether attention needs to be directed to a relevant location for SL to arise. Participants completed a visual-search task, where they were asked to find a unique target shape while ignoring all colored distractors, to reveal how spatial attention and SL affect attentional capture. It was predicted that if spatial attention is needed for SL, then less attentional capture of distractors should be found when distractors are in highly probable spatially attended locations. Thus far, attentional capture is differentially affected by top-down spatial attention and SL.