To cope with the large amount of incoming sensory information, the human visual system needs to focus on relevant aspects of the visual world. Visual selective attention allows humans tor preferentially process relevant and to suppress irrelevant information. Several mechanisms work together in deciding where humans attend: besides stimulus-inherent physical salience which triggers bottom-up mechanisms, goal-based top-down control helps to guide attention to stimuli that are considered relevant to the current task or action. In addition to bottom-up and top-down mechanisms, learning and prior experience can have a substantial impact on attentional selection. In my talk, I will present recent studies that examined how learning and top-down mechanisms interact in deciding where to attend. Our results showed that an informational value acquired in learning strongly determines which stimulus is attended. Such attentional prioritization can transfer to an unrelated task and can persist even when detrimental to task performance. These findings show that learning and selection history can considerably shape attention deployment and can undermine top-down control.