Attention, perception & psychophysics
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Atten Percept Psychophys · Jul 2020
It occurs after all: Attentional bias towards happy faces in the dot-probe task.
Many studies have shown that not only threatening but also positive stimuli capture visual attention. However, in the dot-probe task, a common paradigm to assess attention to emotional stimuli, usually no bias towards happy faces occurs. Here, we investigated whether such a bias can occur and, if so, under which conditions. ⋯ Participants performed a dot-probe task with both happy and angry face cues. A significant attentional bias towards emotional faces occurred that did not differ between both cue emotions. These results suggest that happy faces are sufficiently relevant for observers to capture attention in the dot-probe task.
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Atten Percept Psychophys · Jan 2019
Search efficiency is not sufficient: The nature of search modulates stimulus-driven attention.
It has long been debated whether or not a salient stimulus automatically attracts people's attention in visual search. Recent findings showed that a salient stimulus is likely to capture attention especially when the search process was inefficient due to high levels of competition between the target and distractors. Expanding these studies, the present study proposes that a specific nature of visual search, as well as search efficiency, determines whether or not a salient, task-irrelevant singleton stimulus captures attention. ⋯ On the contrary, the capture by singleton distractors was not observed under the Landolt-C search task. This differential pattern of capture effect was not due to differences in search efficiency across the search tasks; even when search efficiency was controlled for, stimulus-driven capture of attention by a salient distractor was found only under the feature search. Based on these results, the present study suggests that in addition to search efficiency, the nature of search strategy and the extent to which attentional control is strained play crucial roles in observing stimulus-driven attentional capture in visual search.
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Atten Percept Psychophys · Nov 2018
Processing overlap-dependent distractor dilution rather than perceptual target load determines attentional selectivity.
The perceptual load theory of attentional selection argues that the degree to which distractors interfere with target processing is determined by the "perceptual load" (or discrimination difficulty) of target processing: when perceptual load is low, distractors interfere to a greater extent than when it is high. A well-known exception is load-independent interference effects from face distractors during processing of name targets. This finding was reconciled with load theory by proposing distinct processing resources for faces versus names. ⋯ Over four experiments, we first replicate the original finding and then show that load effects grow with increasing processing overlap between potential targets and distractors. However, by adding dilution conditions, we also show that these processing overlap dependent modulations of distractor interference can be explained by the distractor dilution perspective but not by perceptual load theory. Thus, our findings support a processing overlap dilution account of attentional selection.
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Atten Percept Psychophys · Oct 2018
Statistical regularities modulate attentional capture independent of search strategy.
An earlier study using the additional singleton task showed that statistical regularities regarding the distractor location can cause an attentional bias that affects the amount of attentional capture by distractors and the efficiency of selection of targets. The distractor singleton was systematically present more often in one location than in all other locations. The present study investigated whether this bias also occurs when observers adopt a feature search mode, i.e., when they search for a specific feature (circle) between elements with different shapes, while ignoring a colored distractor singleton. ⋯ Contrary to this prediction, we found that even in feature search, both attentional capture by the distractors and the efficiency of selecting the target were impacted by these statistical regularities. Moreover, statistical regularities regarding the feature value of the distractor (its color) had no effect on the amount of capture or the efficiency of selection. We claim that statistical regularities cause passive lingering biases of attention such that on the priority map, the location containing a high probability distractor competes less for attention than locations that are less likely to contain distractors.
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Distraction impairs performance of many important, everyday tasks. Attentional control limits distraction by preferentially selecting important items for limited-capacity cognitive operations. Research in attentional control has typically investigated the degree to which selection of items is stimulus-driven versus goal-driven. ⋯ In Experiment 1, observers who learned distractor rejection in a variable environment rejected a novel distractor more effectively than observers who learned distractor rejection in a less variable, homogeneous environment, demonstrating that variable, heterogeneous stimulus environments encourage generalizable learned distractor rejection. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated the time course of learned distractor rejection across the experiment and found that after experiencing four color-singleton distractors in different blocks, observers could effectively reject subsequent novel color-singleton distractors. These results suggest that the optimization of attentional control to the task environment can be interpreted as a form of learning, demonstrating experience's critical role in attentional control.