Data from: The Scope and Signatures of History-Driven Attention: Perceptual Structures Shape Attentional Priorities

More recently, a third, history-driven mechanism has been proposed, underscoring the role of learned statistical regularities in guiding attention. However, whether this mechanism generalizes to meaningful environmental regularities and exhibits distinct functional profiles remains unclear.

Across a series of experiments, we demonstrated a robust attentional bias toward perceptually structured shape sequences relative to random ones, but not for semantically structured idiom sequences. These findings suggest that higher-level information structures shape attentional priorities beyond mere probabilistic contingencies, while their influence hinges on the nature of the underlying regularities. Temporal analyses further revealed that the attentional bias toward perceptual regularities emerged gradually and remained relatively persistent, in contrast with the rapid yet transient dynamics of stimulus-driven selection.