School of Psychology, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD, Australia.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2010 Dec;36(6):1460-76. doi: 10.1037/a0020370.
On the contingent capture account, top-down attentional control settings restrict involuntary attentional capture to items that match the features of the search target. Attention capture is involuntary, but contingent on goals and intentions. The observation that only target-similar items can capture attention has usually been taken to show that the content of the attentional control settings consists of specific feature values. In contrast, the present study demonstrates that the top-down target template can include information about the relationship between the target and nontarget features (e.g., redder, darker, larger). Several spatial cuing experiments show that a singleton cue that is less similar to the target but that shares the same relational property that distinguishes targets from nontargets can capture attention to the same extent as cues that are similar to the target. Moreover, less similar cues can even capture attention more than cues that are identical to the target when they are relationally better than identical cues. The implications for current theories of attentional capture and attentional guidance are discussed.
在有条件捕获假说中，自上而下的注意力控制设置将非自愿注意力捕获限制在与搜索目标特征匹配的项目上。注意力捕获是无意识的，但取决于目标和意图。只有目标相似的项目才能捕获注意力，这一观察结果通常表明，注意力控制设置的内容包括特定的特征值。相比之下，本研究表明，自上而下的目标模板可以包含有关目标和非目标特征之间关系的信息（例如，更红、更暗、更大）。几项空间提示实验表明，与目标不太相似但共享将目标与非目标区分开来的相同关系属性的单个提示，可以与与目标相似的提示一样程度地吸引注意力。此外，当不相似的提示在关系上优于相同的提示时，它们甚至可以比与目标相同的提示更能吸引注意力。讨论了这些发现对注意力捕获和注意力引导的当前理论的影响。
