Horstmann Gernot
University of Bielefeld, Germany.
Psychol Sci. 2002 Nov;13(6):499-505. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00488.
Three experiments were conducted to investigate whether surprising color singletons capture attention. Participants performed a visual search task in which a target letter had to be detected among distractor letters. Experiments 1 and 2 assessed accuracy as the dependent variable. In Experiment 1, the unannounced presentation of a color singleton 500 ms prior to the letters (and in the same position as the target letter) resulted in better performance than in the preceding conjunction search segment, in which no singleton was presented, and performance was as good in this surprise-singleton trial as in the following feature search segment, in which the singleton always coincided with the target. In contrast, no improvement was observed when the color singleton was presented simultaneously with the letters in Experiment 2, indicating that attentional capture occurred later in the surprise trial than in the feature search segment. In Experiment 3, set size was varied, and reaction time was the dependent variable. Reaction time depended on set size in the conjunction search segment, but not in the surprise trial nor in the feature search segment. The results of the three experiments support the view that surprising color singletons capture attention independently of a corresponding attentional set.
进行了三项实验，以研究令人惊讶的颜色单一元素是否会吸引注意力。参与者执行一项视觉搜索任务，即在干扰字母中检测目标字母。实验1和实验2将准确性作为因变量进行评估。在实验1中，在字母出现前500毫秒（且与目标字母处于相同位置）突然呈现颜色单一元素，其表现优于前一个联合搜索阶段（该阶段未呈现单一元素），并且在这个出现意外单一元素的试验中的表现与随后的特征搜索阶段（单一元素总是与目标重合）一样好。相比之下，在实验2中当颜色单一元素与字母同时呈现时，未观察到表现有所改善，这表明在意外试验中注意力捕获发生的时间比在特征搜索阶段更晚。在实验3中，改变了集合大小，并将反应时间作为因变量。反应时间在联合搜索阶段取决于集合大小，但在意外试验和特征搜索阶段则不然。这三项实验的结果支持了这样一种观点，即令人惊讶的颜色单一元素会独立于相应的注意力集合而吸引注意力。
