What is learned in spatial contextual cuing— configuration or individual locations?

With the use of spatial contextual cuing, we tested whether subjects learned to associate target locations with overall configurations of distractors or with individual locations of distractors. In Experiment 1, subjects were trained on 36 visual search displays that contained 36 sets of distractor locations and 18 target locations. Each target location was paired with two sets of distractor locations on separate trials. After training, the subjects showed perfect transfer to recombined displays, which were created by combining half of one trained distractor set with half of another trained distractor set. This result suggests that individual distractor locations were sufficient to cue the target location. In Experiment 2, the subjects showed good transfer from trained displays to rescaled, displaced, and perceptually regrouped displays, suggesting that the relative locations among items were also learned. Thus, both individual target-distractor associations and configural associations are learned in contextual cuing.     

What is learned in spatial contextual cuing--configuration or individual locations?

With the use of spatial contextual cuing, we tested whether subjects learned to associate target locations with overall configurations of distractors or with individual locations of distractors. In Experiment 1, subjects were trained on 36 visual search displays that contained 36 sets of distractor locations and 18 target locations. Each target location was paired with two sets of distractor locations on separate trials. After training, the subjects showed perfect transfer to recombined displays, which were created by combining half of one trained distractor set with half of another trained distractor set. This result suggests that individual distractor locations were sufficient to cue the target location. In Experiment 2, the subjects showed good transfer from trained displays to rescaled, displaced, and perceptually regrouped displays, suggesting that the relative locations among items were also learned. Thus, both individual target-distractor associations and configural associations are learned in contextual cuing.     

Visual search in a multi-element asynchronous dynamic (MAD) world

In visual search tasks participants search for a target among distractors in strictly controlled displays. We show that visual search principles observed in these tasks do not necessarily apply in more ecologically valid search conditions, using dynamic and complex displays. A multi-element asynchronous dynamic (MAD) visual search was developed in which the stimuli could either be moving, stationary, and/or changing in luminance. The set sizes were high and participants did not know the specific target template. Experiments 1 through 4 showed that, contrary to previous studies, search for moving items was less efficient than search for static items and targets were missed a high percentage of the time. However, error rates were reduced when participants knew the exact target template (Experiment 5) and the difference in search efficiency for moving and stationary targets disappeared when lower set sizes were used (Experiment 6). In all experiments there was no benefit to finding targets defined by a luminance change. The data show that visual search principles previously shown in the literature do not apply to these more complex and "realistically" driven displays.     

Abrupt visual onsets and selective attention: evidence from visual search

The effect of temporal discontinuity on visual search was assessed by presenting a display in which one item had an abrupt onset, while other items were introduced by gradually removing line segments that camouflaged them. We hypothesized that an abrupt onset in a visual display would capture visual attention, giving this item a processing advantage over items lacking an abrupt leading edge. This prediction was confirmed in Experiment 1. We designed a second experiment to ensure that this finding was due to attentional factors rather than to sensory or perceptual ones. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 1 and demonstrated that the procedure used to avoid abrupt onset--camouflage removal--did not require a gradual waveform. Implications of these findings for theories of attention are discussed.     

Strategic and automatic effects of visual working memory on attention in visual search

Previous research indicates that visual attention can be automatically captured by sensory inputs that match the contents of visual working memory. However, Woodman and Luck (2007) showed that information in working memory can be used flexibly as a template for either selection or rejection according to task demands. We report two experiments that extend their work. Participants performed a visual search task while maintaining items in visual working memory. Memory items were presented for either a short or long exposure duration immediately prior to the search task. Memory was tested by a change-detection task immediately afterwards. On a random half of trials items in memory matched either one distractor in the search task (Experiment 1) or three (Experiment 2). The main result was that matching distractors speeded or slowed target detection depending on whether memory items were presented for a long or short duration. These effects were more in evidence with three matching distractors than one. We conclude that the influence of visual working memory on visual search is indeed flexible but is not solely a function of task demands. Our results suggest that attentional capture by perceptual inputs matching information in visual working memory involves a fast automatic process that can be overridden by a slower top-down process of attentional avoidance.     

工作记忆表征引导视觉注意选择的眼动研究

工作记忆表征能否引导视觉注意选择？目前实验结果尚不一致。有研究者认为能否观察到注意引导效应取决于视觉搜索类型。研究采用工作记忆任务与视觉搜索任务相结合的双任务范式, 结合眼动追踪技术, 对不同视觉搜索类型下的注意引导效应进行验证。实验1结果发现, 不管视觉搜索任务的靶子是否变化, 在早期的眼动指标上都发现了显著的注意引导效应, 但注意引导效应在靶子固定的视觉搜索任务下表现得更强。实验2在平衡两种视觉搜索任务中的工作记忆负载后发现, 两种视觉搜索任务下都出现了显著的注意引导效应, 但没有发现实验1中所出现的任务间差异。实验结果否定了视觉搜索类型对注意引导效应的决定性影响, 同时也提示工作记忆负载可能在注意引导效应中起重要作用。     

Numerosity estimates for attended and unattended items in visual search

The goal of this research was to examine memories created for the number of items during a visual search task. Participants performed a visual search task for a target defined by a single feature (Experiment 1A), by a conjunction of features (Experiment 1B), or by a specific spatial configuration of features (Experiment 1C). On some trials following the search task, subjects were asked to recall the total number of items in the previous display. In all search types, participants underestimated the total number of items, but the severity of the underestimation varied depending on the efficiency of the search. In three follow-up studies (Experiments 2A, 2B, and 2C) using the same visual stimuli, the participants’ only task was to estimate the number of items on each screen. Participants still underestimated the numerosity of the items, although the degree of underestimation was smaller than in the search tasks and did not depend on the type of visual stimuli. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to recall the number of items in a display only once. Subjects still displayed a tendency to underestimate, indicating that the underestimation effects seen in Experiments 1A-1C were not attributable to knowledge of the estimation task. The degree of underestimation depends on the efficiency of the search task, with more severe underestimation in efficient search tasks. This suggests that the lower attentional demands of very efficient searches leads to less encoding of numerosity of the distractor set.     

Attentional capture by color without any relevant attentional set

The aim of the present study was to investigate mechanisms underlying attentional capture by color. Previous work has shown that a color singleton is able to summon attention only in the presence of a relevant attentional set, whereas when a color singleton is not useful for a task, evidence for purely stimulus-driven attentional capture is controversial. Three visual search experiments (T-L task) were conducted using a method different from that based on set sizes, consisting of monitoring target-singleton distance in a unique display size. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that attention can be summoned in a real stimulus-driven manner by an irrelevant color singleton. Experiment 2A extended this observation, showing that the color singleton attracted attention even when capture was detrimental. However, Experiment 2B showed that such capture can be strategically prevented. Finally, in Experiment 3, we examined whether such a capture was due to a spatial shift or to a filtering cost, providing evidence supporting the shift hypothesis. Stimulus-driven capture was observed when color was neither the defining nor the reported target attribute (Yantis, 1993) and when subjects naive of visual search tasks were used. The present results give experimental support to many contemporary models of visual attention.     

Automatization and training in visual search.

In several search tasks, the amount of practice on particular combinations of targets and distractors was equated in varied-mapping (VM) and consistent-mapping (CM) conditions. The results indicate the importance of distinguishing between memory and visual search tasks, and implicate a number of factors that play important roles in visual search and its learning. Visual search was studied in Experiment 1. VM and CM performance were almost equal, and slope reductions occurred during practice for both, suggesting the learning of efficient attentive search based on features, and no important role for automatic attention attraction. However, positive transfer effects occurred when previous CM targets were re-paired with previous CM distractors, even though these targets and distractors had not been trained together. Also, the introduction of a demanding simultaneous task produced advantages of CM over VM. These latter two results demonstrated the operation of automatic attention attraction. Visual search was further studied in Experiment 2, using novel characters for which feature overlap and similarity were controlled. The design and many of the findings paralleled Experiment 1. In addition, enormous search improvement was seen over 35 sessions of training, suggesting the operation of perceptual unitization for the novel characters. Experiment 3 showed a large, persistent advantage for CM over VM performance in memory search, even when practice on particular combinations of targets and distractors was equated in the two training conditions. A multifactor theory of automatization and attention is put forth to account for these findings and others in the literature.     

Serial deployment of attention during visual search

This study examined whether objects are attended in serial or in parallel during a demanding visual search task. A component of the event-related potential waveform, the N2pc wave, was used as a continuous measure of the allocation of attention to possible targets in the search arrays. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the relative allocation of attention shifts rapidly, favoring one item and then another. In Experiment 2, a paradigm was used that made it possible to track the absolute allocation of attention to individual items. This experiment showed that attention was allocated to one object for 100-150 ms before attention began to be allocated to the next object. These findings support models of attention that posit serial processing in demanding visual search tasks.     

The role of meaning in contextual cueing: evidence from chess expertise

In contextual cueing, the position of a search target is learned over repeated exposures to a visual display. The strength of this effect varies across stimulus types. For example, real-world scene contexts give rise to larger search benefits than contexts composed of letters or shapes. We investigated whether such differences in learning can be at least partially explained by the degree of semantic meaning associated with a context independently of the nature of the visual information available (which also varies across stimulus types). Chess boards served as the learning context as their meaningfulness depends on the observer's knowledge of the game. In Experiment 1, boards depicted actual game play, and search benefits for repeated boards were 4 times greater for experts than for novices. In Experiment 2, search benefits among experts were halved when less meaningful randomly generated boards were used. Thus, stimulus meaningfulness independently contributes to learning context-target associations.     

Mutual interference between statistical summary perception and statistical learning

The visual system is an efficient statistician, extracting statistical summaries over sets of objects (statistical summary perception) and statistical regularities among individual objects (statistical learning). Although these two kinds of statistical processing have been studied extensively in isolation, their relationship is not yet understood. We first examined how statistical summary perception influences statistical learning by manipulating the task that participants performed over sets of objects containing statistical regularities (Experiment 1). Participants who performed a summary task showed no statistical learning of the regularities, whereas those who performed control tasks showed robust learning. We then examined how statistical learning influences statistical summary perception by manipulating whether the sets being summarized contained regularities (Experiment 2) and whether such regularities had already been learned (Experiment 3). The accuracy of summary judgments improved when regularities were removed and when learning had occurred in advance. In sum, calculating summary statistics impeded statistical learning, and extracting statistical regularities impeded statistical summary perception. This mutual interference suggests that statistical summary perception and statistical learning are fundamentally related.     

Memory-based attentional capture by colour and shape contents in visual working memory

Current theories assume that there is substantial overlap between visual working memory (VWM) and visual attention functioning, such that active representations in VWM automatically act as an attentional set, resulting in attentional biases towards objects that match the mnemonic content. Most evidence for this comes from visual search tasks in which a distractor similar to the memory interferes with the detection of a simultaneous target. Here we provide additional evidence using one of the most popular paradigms in the literature for demonstrating an active attentional set: The contingent spatial orienting paradigm of Folk and colleagues. This paradigm allows memory-based attentional biases to be more directly attributed to spatial orienting. Experiment 1 demonstrated a memory-contingent spatial attention effect for colour but not for shape contents of VWM. Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that the placeholders used for spatial cueing interfered with the shape processing, and showed that memory-based attentional capture for shape returned when placeholders were removed. The results of the present study are consistent with earlier findings from distractor interference paradigms, and provide additional evidence that biases in spatial orienting contribute to memory-based influences on attention.     

Time estimation and concurrent nontemporal processing: Specific interference from short-term-memory demands

Previous studies have shown that the effect of concurrent nontempcraLprocessmg on time astimation may vary depending on the level of difficulty of the nontemporal task. This is commonly interpreted within the context of so-called distraction/interruption models of temporal processing, which propose that as concurrent task difficulty or complexity is increased, temporal processing receives less attention. We hypothesize that the effect of nontemporal processing does not depend on the level of difficulty as such, but rather on the extent to which the concurrent nontemporal task specifically involves processing in short-term meraery. Four experiments were run in which the short-term memory requirements of concurrent tasks were systematically varied, although all of the tasks were of comparable levels of difficulty. In the first experiment, the effect of memory search on simultaneous temporal productions was proportional to the number of items to search. As with reaction time, produced intervals were shown to increase linearly with the number of items in the memorized set. In Experiment 2, a visual search involving some load on short-term memory interfered in the same way with time production, although to a lesser extent. The last two experiments showed that performing attention-demanding visual search tasks that did not involve short-term memory did not lengthen simultaneously produced time inter-vals. This suggests that interference of nontemporal processing on time processing may not be a matter of nonspecific general purpose attentional resources, but rather of concurrent short-term-memory processing demands.     

Auditory statistical learning: predictive frequency information affects the deployment of contextually mediated attentional resources on perceptual tasks

Statistical learning is a general phenomenon in which environmental regularities are implicitly acquired through repeated exposure to those environments. Sometimes, that information can be utilised to affect various aspects of cognitive performance (e.g. reaction time) on tasks that utilise selective attention (e.g. visual search). In the current study, we examined the effect of passively listening to predictive auditory contexts in facilitating attention to a certain frequency or frequency range. In doing so, we found that there is a general tendency for attentional resources to be negatively affected when the context sequences are made novel after context–target associations have been formed (Experiment 1), and when the context no longer reliably cues the previous target (Experiment 2). The experiments are framed to contrast Associative Learning and Memory Hypothesis perspectives.     

Why are there eccentricity effects in visual search? Visual and attentional hypotheses

In standard visual search experiments, observers search for a target item among distracting items. The locations of target items are generally random within the display and ignored as a factor in data analysis. Previous work has shown that targets presented near fixation are, in fact, found more efficiently than are targets presented at more peripheral locations. This paper proposes that the primary cause of this “eccentricity effect” (Carrasco, Evert, Chang, & Katz, 1995) is an attentional bias that allocates attention preferentially to central items. The first four experiments dealt with the possibility that visual, and not attentional, factors underlie the eccentricity effect. They showed that the eccentricity effect cannot be accounted for by the peripheral reduction in visual sensitivity, peripheral crowding, or cortical magnification. Experiment 5 tested the attention allocation model and also showed that RT X set size effects can be independent of eccentricity effects. Experiment 6 showed that the effective set size in a search task depends, in part, on the eccentricity of the target because observers search from fixation outward.     

Mutual inhibition in collaborative recall: evidence for a retrieval-based account

In Experiment 1 participants gave 3 successive free recalls of items learned either individually or in pairwise collaboration. The first and third recalls were performed individually, the second alone or in collaboration. Collaborative recall led to an inhibitory effect after individual learning but not after collaborative learning, in which partners had similar retrieval strategies. Consistent with a retrieval locus for collaborative inhibition, non-recalled items reappeared in subsequent individual recall. Experiment 2 showed that collaborative inhibition was eliminated when a separate retrieval cue was given for each item. Experiments 2 and 3 also showed that when participants learned items in the same order, their retrieval strategies were more similar and they showed less collaborative inhibition. It is concluded that mutual interference in collaborative recall is due to the mutual disruption of individual retrieval strategies.     

Posthypnotic amnesia for recently learned material: Interactions with “episodic” and “semantic” memory

In two experiments, posthypnotic amnesia was suggested for a word list memorized during hypnosis. After an initial test of amnesia the subjects gave word associations (Experiment 1) or category instances (Experiment 2) to stimuli intended to elicit the critical (word list) items covered by the amnesia. The extent of initial amnesia observed was strongly associated with measured hypnotic susceptibility. Even among the most hypnotizable subjects, however, the dense amnesia did not prevent the critical items from being elicited by the semantic memory tasks, nor did it modulate the priming which these associations received by virtue of the prior learning experience. Moreover, production of the critical items did not, in general, remind the amnesic subjects of those items which they had previously learned, but could not now remember. Full memory was restored after the amnesia suggestion was canceled by a prearranged cue. Posthypnotic amnesia appears to represent a temporary dissociation of episodic features from memory traces, so that the subject has difficulty in reconstructing the context in which the target events occurred.     

On the distinction between visual salience and stimulus-driven attentional capture.

It is often assumed that the efficient detection of salient visual objects in search reflects stimulus-driven attentional capture. Evidence for this assumption, however, comes from tasks in which the salient object is task relevant and therefore may elicit a deliberate deployment of attention. In 9 experiments, participants searched for a nonsalient target (vertical among tilted bars). In each display, 1 bar was highly salient in a different dimension (e.g., color or motion). When the target and salient elements coincided only rarely, reducing the incentive to attend deliberately to the salient stimuli, response times depended little on whether the target was salient, although some interesting exceptions were observed. It is concluded that efficient selection of an element in visual search does not constitute evidence that the element captures attention in a purely stimulus-driven fashion.     

积极情绪反馈对注意捕获影响的实验研究

目的：研究采用“学习-测试”范式,通过3个实验探讨积极社会情绪反馈对注意捕获的影响。方法：实验1,在学习阶段做出反应后,分别给予积极情绪和中性情绪反馈,探讨积极情绪和中性情绪捕获注意的情况;实验2,学习阶段做出反应后,没有任何情绪反馈;实验3,改变学习阶段积极情绪和中性情绪反馈图片出现的频率,探讨图片出现频率对注意捕获的影响。结果：（1）与中性情绪相比,积极情绪捕获了较多注意（实验1）;（2）无情绪反馈时,经过多次练习的刺激作为干扰刺激也捕获到了注意（实验2）;（3）积极情绪影响刺激注意优先性的过程还受到积极情绪图片出现频率的影响（实验3）。结论：积极情绪捕获注意的机制中,也有自上而下目标驱动的机制在起作用;情绪图片出现的频率也会影响社社会情绪对注意的捕获。