Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： In visual search, the phenomenon that attention is attracted by task-independent salient stimulus, which leads to search efficiency reduction is called attentional capture. In the traditional theories of visual attentional capture, stimulus-driven theory and goal-driven theory were argued for nearly 20 years. According to stimulus-driven theory, attention is automatically captured by physically salient objects, and regardless of the intentions of the observers. Other researchers believe that only stimuli that match the features of the search target will capture attention. In recent years, two new hybrid models were proposed, which combined bottom-up capture and top-down control settings, called rapid disengagement hypothesis and signal suppression hypothesis. The main content of the rapid disengagement hypothesis is that a salient distractor can always capture attention in a bottom-up manner, but attention only landed on the position of the highlighted stimulus that similar to the target. If the selected stimulus does not look like the target at all, disengagement from that location would be fast and swift. In the empirical evidences of the rapid disengagement hypothesis, spatial-cueing paradigm and oculomotor disengagement paradigm were most often adopted. In those tasks, participants usually took a singleton search strategy to promote search. The signal suppression hypothesis posits that a salient object can automatically produce a bottom-up “attend-to-me” signal, but this signal can be suppressed via top-down control processes when the highlighted object does not meet the task requirements. In the empirical evidences of the signal suppression hypothesis, an additional singleton paradigm was most often adopted. In those tasks, participants were forced to take a feature search strategy. The rapid disengagement hypothesis and the signal suppression hypothesis are indispensable components of the theories of attentional capture, and there are both similarities and differences between them. The similarity lies in the fact that both two theories assume that the initial stage of the attention capture occurs automatically. However, there are different opinions about the shifting of attention during this initial stage. The rapid disengagement hypothesis holds that there is an attention shift in the initial stage of the processing of the salient stimulus, and when the attention has enough time to disengage from the highlight stimulus that does not match the target, attentional capture will not occur. Different from the above views, the signal suppression hypothesis believes that there is no attention shift in the initial stage of the highlight stimulus processing. Attention capture does not actually occur because the salience signal can be suppressed by a top-down mechanism when the salient stimulus is inconsistent with the target. Future researches would focus on the following aspects: (1) More studies adopting different stimuli and experimental methods are needed to support rapid disengagement hypothesis and signal suppression hypothesis; (2) The effects of reward and training on “attentional capture-disengagement” and “signal-suppression” should also be explored in future researches; (3) The neural bases of reactive inhibition mechanism and active inhibition mechanism that involved in rapid disengagement hypothesis and signal suppression hypothesis is a problem which deserves attention.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： It has been well documented that the spotlight of attention is intrinsically rhythmic, which discretely samples a single or multiple objects. Adopting high resolution behavioral approach, attention oscillation has been revealed. However, neural mechanism of attention oscillation remains poorly understood. In the present study, basing on functional anatomy of the primary visual cortex, we aimed to investigate the role of primary visual cortex (V1) in attention oscillation, by using a modified high temporal resolution cue-target paradigm in a 4AFC task. In the present study, behavioral oscillations in visual attention under ordinary (binocular; not dichoptic) viewing condition (exp. 1) and binocular dichoptic (exp. 2) condition were examined. In experiment 1, 16 paid participants were asked to detect target at either the previously cued (valid condition) or uncued location (invalid condition). The cue-target SOA varied from 0.1 s to 1.08 s in steps of 20 ms. Performances were evaluated in a 4AFC task. If they saw target, they were instructed to judge the location of the target (1 for target on the upper left; 2 for upper right; 4 for lower left; 5 for lower right) on the keypad. While, 16 paid participants were recruited to detect target at either cued or uncued locations under binocular dichoptic condition. Target could occur in the same or different eye of cue stimuli. Amplitude of target contrast decrement was determined with QUEST procedure before cue-target experiment. Except that no cue stimuli were presented, threshold procedure was identical to the cue-target experiment procedure. Results showed that when grating locations were presented under ordinary viewing condition, a theta rhythm was visible. While targets were presented in the same or different eye under binocular dichoptic condition, attention oscillation was clearly seen at 12.5 Hz with antiphase relationship between cued and uncued conditions. The findings under ordinary viewing condition are in general consistent with previous studies. While, under binocular dichoptic condition, attention oscillation increased to a higher frequency. This study indicates that attention oscillation may occur at or beyond primary visual cortex where binocular integration begins.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： It is well-known that attentional orienting is contingent on the features of attentional settings, and in recent years, an increasing number of studies have supported that the meaningful contingency between cue and target stimuli modulates spatial attention. However, the spatial distribution of meaning-guided attentional orienting has not been thoroughly elucidated, especially in noncentral space. To address this issue, we examined the attentional orienting effects by establishing the meaningful contingency between the objects and how the attentional orienting was affected by the nature of the objects. Furthermore, the attentional distribution in the noncentral fields was analyzed. A modified spatial cueing paradigm was employed in the current study. In Experiment 1, cues were presented as strawberry or watermelon sketches, and targets were presented in red or green. The participants were asked to discriminate the location of the gap of the target square in different cue-target blocks. Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1, except that the cues were white Chinese characters, “红” (meaning red) or “绿” (meaning green), and the number of possible positions was increased from four to six. Experiment 3 was identical to Experiment 2, except that the cue and target stimuli were swapped, where cues were presented in red or green and targets were Chinese characters in white. The results indicated that the inhibition effects were found in the lower spatial field and the increasing capture effects were found in the left and right and the upper spatial fields when the sketches were adopted as cues in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, it was found that there was a general trend of inhibition and capture effects from the lower to upper locations, but only part of the inhibition effects reached significance when the number of the positions was increased and the Chinese character cues were employed. Experiment 3 replicated the results obtained in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 when color cues were utilized, but more robust inhibition and capture effects were obtained. The results of this study indicated that (1) the meaningful contingency between the objects guided the visuospatial attentional orienting, highlighting the inhibition and capture effects in different visuospatial fields; (2) the nature of the object modulated the meaningful-contingent attentional orienting, showing that the more vivid the object was, the more modulated it was, whereas the more abstract the object was, the less modulated it was; and (3) the meaningful-contingent attentional orienting was performed regularly in different visual fields, highlighting the location-based inhibition and capture from the lower to the upper fields.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2020-10-30
Abstract： " " "
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2020-09-04
Abstract： " In the traditional theory of visual attentional capture, the stimulus-driven theory and goal-driven theory were argued for nearly 20 years. Later, two new hybrid models were proposed, which combined bottom-up capture and top-down control settings, called the rapid disengagement hypothesis and the signal suppression hypothesis. The main content of the rapid disengagement hypothesis is that attention is captured by a salient distractor but is immediately disengaged when the distractor does not contain target’s defining attribute. Signal suppression hypothesis posits that a salient distractor can automatically produce a bottom-up “attend-to-me” signal, but this signal can be suppressed via top-down control processes so that it does not actually capture attention. The empirical evidence of the rapid disengagement hypothesis indicated that the spatial-cuing paradigm and oculomotor disengagement paradigm were most often adopted, and participants took the singleton search strategy. The empirical evidence of the signal suppression hypothesis indicated that the additional singleton paradigm was most often adopted, and participants were forced to take the feature search strategy. In the future, more studies adopting different stimuli and experimental methods are needed to support those two hybrid models. The effects of reward and training on “attentional capture-disengagement” and “signal-suppression” should also be explored in future research.
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
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