Vogt Julia, De Houwer Jan, Moors Agnes, Van Damme Stefaan, Crombez Geert
Department of Experimental - Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2010 May;134(1):61-9. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2009.12.006. Epub 2010 Jan 15.
It is often assumed that attention is automatically allocated to stimuli relevant to one's actual goals. However, the existing evidence for this idea is limited in several ways. We investigated whether words relevant to a person's current goal influence the orienting of attention even when an intention to attend to the goal-relevant stimuli is not present. In two experiments, participants performed a modified spatial cueing paradigm combined with a second task that induced a goal. The results of the experiments showed that the induced goal led to the orientation of attention to goal-relevant words in the spatial cueing task. This effect was not found for words semantically related to the goal-relevant words. The results provide evidence for motivational accounts of attention, which state that the automatic allocation of attention is guided by the current goals of a person.
人们常常认为，注意力会自动分配到与个人实际目标相关的刺激上。然而，支持这一观点的现有证据在几个方面存在局限性。我们研究了即使在没有关注与目标相关刺激的意图时，与个人当前目标相关的词语是否会影响注意力的定向。在两项实验中，参与者执行了一种修改后的空间线索范式，并结合了一项诱导目标的第二项任务。实验结果表明，诱导目标导致在空间线索任务中注意力定向到与目标相关的词语上。对于与目标相关词语语义相关的词语，未发现这种效应。这些结果为注意力的动机性解释提供了证据，该解释认为注意力的自动分配是由个人当前目标引导的。
