Brockmole James R, Boot Walter R
Psychology Department, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2009 Jun;35(3):808-15. doi: 10.1037/a0013707.
Distinctive aspects of a scene can capture attention even when they are irrelevant to one's goals. The authors address whether visually unique, unexpected, but task-irrelevant features also tend to hold attention. Observers searched through displays in which the color of each item was irrelevant. At the start of search, all objects changed color. Critically, the foveated item changed to an unexpected color (it was novel), became a color singleton (it was unique), or both. Saccade latency revealed the time required to disengage overt attention from this object. Singletons resulted in longer latencies, but only if they were unexpected. Conversely, unexpected items only delayed disengagement if they were singletons. Thus, the time spent overtly attending to an object is determined, at least in part, by task-irrelevant stimulus properties, but this depends on the confluence of expectation and visual salience.
场景中独特的方面即使与个人目标无关也能吸引注意力。作者探讨了视觉上独特、意外但与任务无关的特征是否也倾向于吸引注意力。观察者在每个物品颜色与任务无关的展示中进行搜索。在搜索开始时，所有物体都改变了颜色。关键在于，被注视的物品会变成意想不到的颜色（它是新奇的），成为颜色单一物（它是独特的），或者两者皆是。扫视潜伏期揭示了将显性注意力从此物体上移开所需的时间。单一物会导致更长的潜伏期，但前提是它们是意想不到的。相反，意想不到的物品只有在它们是单一物时才会延迟注意力的移开。因此，显性关注一个物体所花费的时间至少部分取决于与任务无关的刺激属性，但这取决于期望和视觉显著性的共同作用。
