Cognitive control and counterproductive oculomotor capture by reward-related stimuli

Two experiments investigated the extent to which value-modulated oculomotor capture is subject to top-down control. In these experiments, participants were never required to look at the reward-related stimuli; indeed, doing so was directly counterproductive because it caused omission of the reward that would otherwise have been obtained. In Experiment 1, participants were explicitly informed of this omission contingency. Nevertheless, they still showed counterproductive oculomotor capture by reward-related stimuli, suggesting that this effect is relatively immune to cognitive control. Experiment 2 more directly tested whether this capture is controllable by comparing the performance of participants who either had or had not been explicitly informed of the omission contingency. There was no evidence that value-modulated oculomotor capture differed between the two conditions, providing further evidence that this effect proceeds independently of cognitive control. Taken together, the results of the present research provide strong evidence for the automaticity and cognitive impenetrability of value-modulated attentional capture.     

The making of careers, the making of a discipline: Luck and chance in migrant careers in geriatric medicine

The geriatric specialty, unpopular among most UK born and trained medical graduates, provided an opportunity for career development and achievement for those doctors whose training had been non-standard for a variety of reasons. Migrant doctors who have played a substantive role in the UK National Health Service since its inception made an important contribution to the building of that specialty, at the same time building their own careers. This paper draws on oral history interviews with the UK trained pioneers of geriatric medicine and with South Asian overseas trained doctors who entered the geriatric specialty in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It critically reviews the literature of skilled migration, specifically in terms of ‘brain drain’ and ‘push–pull’, focusing on historical and socio-cognitive communities and emphasizes the contribution of individual narratives of career development in the lives of migrants. Focusing on the use of luck and chance in accounts it suggests that although such terms are indicative of chance upon opportunity, they also suggest a role for agency in career development in contexts which were not auspicious. The outcome, for those interviewed, was regarded positively in career terms, but also had a significant part to play in the development of the career of the specialty of geriatric medicine and in the lives of the marginalized people for whom they developed a service.     

Why are auditory novels distracting? Contrasting the roles of novelty, violation of expectation and stimulus change

Past studies show that novel auditory stimuli, presented in the context of an otherwise repeated sound, capture participants’ attention away from a focal task, resulting in measurable behavioral distraction. Novel sounds are traditionally defined as rare and unexpected but past studies have not sought to disentangle these concepts directly. Using a cross-modal oddball task, we contrasted these aspects orthogonally by manipulating the base rate and conditional probabilities of sound events. We report for the first time that behavioral distraction does not result from a sound’s novelty per se but from the violation of the cognitive system’s expectation based on the learning of conditional probabilities and, to some extent, the occurrence of a perceptual change from one sound to another.     

The attentional blink unveils the interplay between conscious perception,spatial attention and working memory encoding

Our ability to perceive two events in close temporal succession is severely limited, a phenomenon known as the attentional blink. While the blink has served as a popular tool to prevent conscious perception, there is less research on its causes, and in particular on the role of conscious perception of the first event in triggering it. In three experiments, we disentangled the roles of spatial attention, conscious perception and working memory (WM) in causing the blink. We show that while allocating spatial attention to T1 is neither necessary nor sufficient for eliciting a blink, consciously perceiving it is necessary but not sufficient. When T1 was task irrelevant, consciously perceiving it triggered a blink only when it matched the attentional set for T2. We conclude that consciously perceiving a task-relevant event causes the blink, possibly because it triggers encoding of this event into WM. We discuss the implications of these findings for the relationship between spatial attention, conscious perception and WM, as well as for the distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness.     

工作记忆内容驱动完全无关刺激捕获注意

研究通过三个实验以检验工作记忆内容能否自动引导注意选择视场中与之匹配的任务完全无关刺激。实验一要求被试在工作记忆保持阶段完成一个视觉搜索任务，结果发现当搜索序列外的无关干扰刺激与工作记忆内容匹配时搜索绩效显著降低；实验二结果表明该干扰效应不能归因于自下而上的启动机制，因为对颜色刺激仅仅进行知觉辨认而没有工作记忆加工时并没有产生启动效应；实验三通过缩短搜索任务刺激的呈现时间以使得被试在完成搜索任务前没有足够时间眼跳至无关干扰刺激，结果发现了与实验一类似的干扰效应，说明在没有眼跳的情况下与工作记忆内容匹配的完全无关刺激可以捕获注意。这些结果表明保持在工作记忆中的信息表征可以自动引导注意选择视场中与之匹配的任务完全无关刺激，为基于工作记忆内容的注意捕获提供了新证据支持。     

Selection history-driven signal suppression

ABSTRACT

The control of attention is influenced by current goals, physical salience, and selection history. Under certain conditions, physically salient stimuli can be strategically suppressed below baseline levels, facilitating visual search for a target. It is unclear whether such signal suppression is a broad mechanism of selective information processing that extends to other sources of attentional priority evoked by task-irrelevant stimuli, or whether it is particular to physically salient perceptual signals. Using eye movements, in the present study we highlight a case where a former-target-colour distractor facilitates search for a target on a large percentage of trials. Our findings provide evidence that the principle of signal suppression extends to other sources of attentional priority beyond physical salience, and that selection history can be leveraged to strategically guide attention away from a stimulus.