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.     

Staying and Returning dynamics of young children's attention

In this paper, we decompose selective sustained attending behavior into components of continuous attention maintenance and attentional transitions and study how each of these components develops in young children. Our results in two experiments suggest that changes in children's ability to return attention to a target locus after distraction (“Returning”) play a crucial role in the development of selective sustained attention between the ages of 3.5–6 years, perhaps to a greater extent than changes in the ability to continuously maintain attention on the target (“Staying”). We further distinguish Returning from the behavior of transitioning attention away from task (i.e., becoming distracted) and investigate the relative contributions of bottom-up and top-down factors on these different types of attentional transitions. Overall, these results (a) suggest the importance of understanding the cognitive process of transitioning attention for understanding selective sustained attention and its development, (b) provide an empirical paradigm within which to study this process, and (c) begin to characterize basic features of this process, namely its development and its relative dependence on top-down and bottom-up influences on attention.

Research Highlights

• Young children exhibited an endogenously ability, Returning, to preferentially transition attention to task-relevant information over task-irrelevant information.
• Selective sustained attention and its development were decomposed into Returning and Staying, or task-selective attention maintenance, using novel eye-tracking-based measures.
• Returning improved between the ages of 3.5–6 years, to a greater extent than Staying.
• Improvements in Returning supported improvements in selective sustained attention between these ages.

     

Near-hand effects are robust: Three OSF pre-registered replications of visual biases in perihand space

ABSTRACT

Although previous work provides evidence that observers experience biases in visual processing when they view stimuli in perihand space, a few recent investigations have questioned the reliability of these near-hand effects. We addressed this controversy by running three pre-registered replication experiments. Experiment 1 was a replication of one of the initial studies on facilitated target detection near the hands in which participants performed an attentional cueing task while placing a single hand either near or far from the display. Experiment 2 tested the same paradigm while adopting the design of a recent experiment that called into question near-hand facilitation. Experiment 3 was a replication of a study in which hand proximity influenced working memory performance in a change detection paradigm. Across all three experiments, we found significant interactions between hand position and stimulus characteristics that indicated the hands’ presence altered visual processing, bolstering evidence favouring the robustness of near-hand effects.