Olivers Christian N L, Humphreys Glyn W
Behavioural Brain Science Centre, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.
Cogn Psychol. 2003 Aug;47(1):1-42. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0285(03)00003-3.
This paper is concerned with how we prioritize the selection of new objects in visual scenes. We present four experiments investigating the effects of distractor previews on visual search through new objects. Participants viewed a set of to-be-ignored nontargets, with the task being to search for a target in a second set, added to the first after 1000ms. This second set could contain a salient feature singleton, defined in terms of its color, orientation, or both color and orientation. When the singleton was a distractor, search was slowed relative to when there was no singleton. Search was facilitated when the singleton was a target. Interestingly, both the interference and facilitation effects were modulated when the preview shared features with the singleton. Follow-up experiments showed that this reduction of singleton effects was not due to: (i) low-level sensory aspects of the displays, (ii) increased heterogeneity in the search set in the preview condition, or (iii) color-based grouping of old and new items. Instead, we suggest that there is an inhibitory carry-over from the first to the second set of items based on feature similarity. We suggest the suppression stems from a process termed visual marking, which suppresses irrelevant visual objects in anticipation of more relevant new objects (Watson & Humphreys, 1997). The findings argue against alternative explanations such as the automatic capture by abrupt new onsets account.
本文关注的是我们如何在视觉场景中对新物体的选择进行优先级排序。我们进行了四项实验，研究干扰物预览对通过新物体进行视觉搜索的影响。参与者观看一组需要忽略的非目标物，任务是在1000毫秒后添加到第一组中的第二组中搜索目标物。第二组可能包含一个显著特征单一物，根据其颜色、方向或颜色和方向两者来定义。当单一物是干扰物时，相对于没有单一物的情况，搜索速度会减慢。当单一物是目标物时，搜索会变得更容易。有趣的是，当预览与单一物共享特征时，干扰和促进效应都会受到调节。后续实验表明，单一物效应的这种降低不是由于：（i）显示的低层次感官方面，（ii）预览条件下搜索集中增加的异质性，或（iii）新旧项目基于颜色的分组。相反，我们认为基于特征相似性，从第一组项目到第二组项目存在抑制性的延续。我们认为这种抑制源于一个被称为视觉标记的过程，该过程在预期更相关的新物体时抑制不相关的视觉物体（沃森和汉弗莱斯，1997）。这些发现反对了诸如突然出现的新刺激自动捕获等替代解释。
