Verney Steven P, Granholm Eric, Marshall Sandra P
Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System, San Diego, CA, USA.
Int J Psychophysiol. 2004 Mar;52(1):23-36. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2003.12.003.
Cognitive processing efficiency requires both an ability to attend to task-relevant stimuli with quickness and accuracy, also while filtering distracting or task-irrelevant stimuli. This study investigated cognitive processing efficiency by using pupillary responses as an index of attentional allocation to relevant target and irrelevant masks on a visual backward masking task. The relationship between attentional allocation on this task and general cognitive ability on the scholastic aptitude test (SAT) was examined in college students (n=67). A principle components analysis of the pupillary response waveform isolated a late component that appeared to index the attentional demands associated with processing masks on the backward masking task. This pupillary response index of wasteful resource allocation to the mask accounted for significant variance in SAT scores over and above that accounted for by socio-economic status and target detection accuracy scores. Consistent with the neural efficiency hypothesis, individuals who allocated more resources to processing irrelevant information performed more poorly on cognitive ability tests.
认知加工效率既需要具备快速且准确地关注与任务相关刺激的能力，同时还要过滤干扰性或与任务无关的刺激。本研究通过使用瞳孔反应作为注意力分配指标，来考察在视觉反向掩蔽任务中对相关目标和无关掩蔽的认知加工效率。在大学生（n = 67）中，研究了该任务上的注意力分配与学业能力倾向测验（SAT）上的一般认知能力之间的关系。对瞳孔反应波形进行主成分分析，分离出一个晚期成分，该成分似乎可索引与反向掩蔽任务中处理掩蔽相关的注意力需求。这种对掩蔽的资源浪费分配的瞳孔反应指标，在社会经济地位和目标检测准确性分数所解释的方差之外，还解释了SAT分数中的显著方差。与神经效率假说一致，在处理无关信息上分配更多资源的个体在认知能力测试中的表现更差。
