To find important objects, we must focus on our goals, ignore distractions, and take our changing environment into account. This is formalized in models of visual search whereby goal-driven, stimulus-driven and history-driven factors are integrated into a priority map that guides attention. Stimulus history robustly influences where attention is allocated even when the physical stimulus is the same: when a salient distractor is repeated over time, it captures attention less effectively. A key open question is how we come to ignore salient distractors when they are repeated. Goal-driven accounts propose that we use an active, expectation-driven mechanism to attenuate the distractor signal (e.g., predictive coding), whereas stimulus-driven accounts propose that the distractor signal is attenuated due to passive changes to neural activity and inter-item competition (e.g., adaptation). To test these competing accounts, we measured item-specific fMRI responses in human visual cortex during a visual search task ...