Impact of nurse-parent partnership, social support, and uncertainty on parental efficacy among mothers of children hospitalized in pediatric wards in South Korea: a cross-sectional study.

Physically salient visual stimuli, such as abrupt onsets and color singletons, are known to elicit involuntary attentional capture, often interfering with the efficient execution of goal-directed tasks (). However, when a distractor appears in a specific location frequently, humans can gradually learn to suppress the interference caused by the salient stimulus at that high-probability distractor location (HPDL) (; ; ). Through repeated exposure, the visual system implicitly estimates the spatial probability distribution of distractor occurrences, enabling suppression at the HPDL and thereby mitigating their disruptive effects (; ; ). This adaptive phenomenon reflects the process of statistical learning (SL), which refers to the automatic and incidental extraction of regularities from the environment based on experience. Without the need for explicit instruction or conscious awareness, SL allows the attentional system to adaptively modulate its responses in accordance with the probabilistic structure of the visual context (; ; ; ). In addition to distractor suppression, SL also contributes to target-related attentional biases. When targets repeatedly occur at a specific location, attention becomes increasingly allocated to that high-probability target location (HPTL), thereby improving target detection and facilitating behavioral performance (; ; ). The joint effects of distractor suppression and target facilitation indicate that SL plays a central role in optimizing attentional guidance. By enabling the visual system to allocate attentional resources in a manner that reflects environmental regularities, SL supports efficient and goal-directed behavior in complex visual environments (; ; ). SL can modulate the priority assigned to specific spatial locations within the attentional system. According to the attentional priority map framework proposed by , the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) represents the relative behavioral relevance of different spatial locations, thereby guiding visual attention and oculomotor behavior. Locations of higher behavioral priority show enhanced activation in the LIP, which guides the visual system to allocate more attention and prompts eye movements toward these locations. Factors that influence attentional priority encompass top–down goal-driven processes, bottom–up stimulus salience, and selection history (; ; ; ; ). The first two factors exert an immediate influence based on task demands or the salience of the stimuli. Selection history, however, is gradually established through past experience, such as SL. Within this framework, SL of target locations increases the attentional priority of HPTLs, facilitating faster and more efficient target selection. In contrast, SL of distractor locations reduces the priority of the HPDL, enabling proactive suppression of potential interference. Unlike the momentary impacts of top–down goals and bottom–up salience, SL-driven effects are robust and long lasting, persisting over hundreds of trials even after the underlying spatial probabilities are no longer present (; ; ; ). These findings have prompted growing interest in whether such learned modulations of attentional priority can generalize beyond the specific task context in which they were acquired. Emerging evidence suggests that they can—a phenomenon known as the generalization effect. One manifestation of this effect has been investigated in studies that interleaved trials of two tasks to examine a transient and unpredictable form of transfer across tasks (; ; ). Among these, studies of distractor statistical learning demonstrated that the learned suppression is not strictly tied to a single task (; ).