LaBerge D, Auclair L, Sieroff E
Simon's Rock College of Bard, Great Barrington, Massachusetts 01230, USA.
Conscious Cogn. 2000 Sep;9(3):396-434. doi: 10.1006/ccog.1999.0429.
This study investigated attention to a spatial location using a new spatial preparation task. Participants responded to a target dot presented in the center of a display and ignored a distractor dot presented to the right or left of the center. In an attempt to vary the level of preparatory attention directed to the target, the distractor dot was presented prior to the onset time of the target and the relative frequency of distractor dots to target dots within a block of trials was varied. The results from the first three experiments showed that when instructions induce weak preparatory attention to the target location, response times to a target on target-only trials increase substantially as the percentage of trials containing a distractor increases from 0 to 75%. In Experiments 2 and 3, instructions and display saliency were used to induce strong preparatory attention to the target location, resulting in almost constant response times across distractor percentages. Experiment 4 varied percentage of target trials in the absence of distractors, with the result that response times decreased as target trial percentage increased. Accounts of these data by early "activity-based" and late "criterion-based" attention theories are compared, and the early theory is given a more detailed description within the context of a cognitive neuroscience theory of attention.
本研究使用一种新的空间准备任务来调查对空间位置的注意力。参与者对出现在显示屏中心的目标点做出反应，并忽略出现在中心右侧或左侧的干扰点。为了改变对目标的准备性注意力水平，干扰点在目标出现时间之前呈现，并且在一组试验中干扰点与目标点的相对频率是变化的。前三个实验的结果表明，当指令引起对目标位置的较弱准备性注意力时，在仅出现目标的试验中，随着包含干扰点的试验百分比从0增加到75%，对目标的反应时间大幅增加。在实验2和3中，使用指令和显示显著性来引起对目标位置的较强准备性注意力，结果是在不同干扰点百分比情况下反应时间几乎保持不变。实验4改变了无干扰情况下目标试验的百分比，结果是随着目标试验百分比增加，反应时间减少。对这些数据的早期“基于活动”和晚期“基于标准”注意力理论解释进行了比较，并在注意力的认知神经科学理论背景下对早期理论进行了更详细的描述。
