People rely on a number of methods to avoid information that would compel them to change their beliefs or behaviors. However, it remains unclear whether people use visual inattention as a method of information avoidance. In three eye-tracking experiments, we test the hypothesis that people avoid visual information by strategically suppressing and facilitating visual attention depending on where desired and avoided information is likely to appear. Introducing a novel search task, we independently manipulate the probability of where desired and avoided information appear on the screen. Study 1 show that participants learn statistical regularities in information location and utilize this to gradually suppress attention to undesired information. Study 2 and 3 show that participants can simultaneously reduce and increase visual attention to areas where avoided and desired information are most likely to appear. The findings point to suppression of attention as a mechanism behind information avoidance through visual inattention and that reducing the predictability of where information appears could be a fruitful avenue for reducing it.

中文翻译：

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选择不看：视觉不注意作为信息回避的一种方法


人们依靠多种方法来避免那些迫使他们改变信念或行为的信息。然而，目前尚不清楚人们是否使用视觉不注意作为回避信息的方法。在三个眼球追踪实验中，我们测试了这样一个假设：人们通过根据期望和避免的信息可能出现的位置，策略性地抑制和促进视觉注意力来避免视觉信息。引入一种新颖的搜索任务，我们独立地操纵所需信息和避免信息出现在屏幕上的概率。研究1表明，参与者学习了信息定位的统计规律，并利用它来逐渐抑制对不需要的信息的关注。研究 2 和 3 表明，参与者可以同时减少和增加对最有可能出现回避信息和期望信息的区域的视觉注意力。研究结果指出，注意力抑制是通过视觉注意力不集中而回避信息的一种机制，而降低信息出现位置的可预测性可能是减少信息出现的有效途径。