Adaptive suppression of threat-history stimuli

Previous studies have found evidence of adaptive suppression mechanisms for physically salient stimuli. However, it remains unclear whether a similar mechanism exists for threat-history stimuli. This study used a threat conditioning task to generate stimuli with and without a history of threat. In the subsequent visual search task, the spatial probability of distractors was manipulated to examine the influence of threat-history stimuli on distractor suppression. The results showed that distractors appearing at high-probability locations were effectively suppressed, and suppression was stronger for threat-history distractors than for no-threat-history distractors. These findings suggest that threat-history distractors are more effectively suppressed when they appear at a predictable location through an adaptive attentional suppression mechanism. Data availabilityAll data supporting the findings are openly available via the Science Data Bank (https://www.scidb.cn/anonymous/VlpqNm55).