Koivisto Mika, Revonsuo Antti
Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Turku, 20014, Turku, Finland.
Psychol Res. 2008 Jan;72(1):39-48. doi: 10.1007/s00426-006-0072-4. Epub 2006 Jul 5.
When participants are attending to a subset of visual targets or events and ignoring irrelevant distractors ("selective looking"), they often fail to detect the appearance of an unexpected visual object or event even when the object is visible for several seconds ("sustained inattentional blindness"). An important factor influencing detection rates in selective looking is the attentional set of the participant: the more similar the features of the unexpected object are to the attended ones, the more probably it will be detected. We examined the possible contribution of active ignoring to this similarity effect by studying the role of the distractor objects in sustained inattentional blindness. First we showed the similarity effect for chromatic colors and then we manipulated the similarity of the unexpected object in relation to the distractor objects and did not find any effects. Moreover, we found that inattentional blindness was present even when the displays did not contain any irrelevant to-be-ignored objects. We conclude that attending to target items on the basis of attentional set, but not active ignoring of nontargets items, is sufficient for the occurrence of sustained inattentional blindness.
当参与者专注于视觉目标或事件的一个子集并忽略无关的干扰物（“选择性注视”）时，即使意外视觉对象或事件出现了几秒钟，他们也常常未能察觉（“持续性疏忽性失明”）。影响选择性注视中检测率的一个重要因素是参与者的注意力设定：意外对象的特征与被关注对象越相似，就越有可能被检测到。我们通过研究干扰物对象在持续性疏忽性失明中的作用，考察了主动忽略对这种相似性效应的可能影响。首先，我们展示了颜色方面的相似性效应，然后我们操纵了意外对象与干扰物对象的相似性，未发现任何影响。此外，我们发现，即使显示中不包含任何无关的待忽略对象，疏忽性失明仍然存在。我们得出结论，基于注意力设定关注目标项目，而非主动忽略非目标项目，就足以导致持续性疏忽性失明的发生。
