Department of Psychology, Queen's University, 62 Arch Street, Humphrey Hall, Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6, Canada.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2011 Apr;37(2):319-35. doi: 10.1037/a0021433.
Lavie and Tsal (1994) proposed that spare attentional capacity is allocated involuntarily to the processing of irrelevant stimuli, thereby enabling interference. Under this view, when task demands increase, spare capacity should decrease and distractor interference should decrease. In support, Lavie and Cox (1997) found that increasing perceptual load by increasing search set size decreased interference from an irrelevant distractor. In three experiments, we manipulated the cue set size (number of cued locations) independently of the display set size (number of letters presented). Increasing the display set size reduced distractor interference regardless of whether the additional letters were relevant to the task. In contrast, increasing the cue set size increased distractor interference. Both findings are inconsistent with the load explanation, but are consistent with a proposed two-stage dilution account.
拉维和察尔（1994 年）提出，备用注意力容量会被自动分配到对不相关刺激的处理上，从而导致干扰。根据这种观点，当任务需求增加时，备用容量应该减少，干扰也应该减少。拉维和考克斯（1997 年）支持这一观点，他们发现通过增加搜索集的大小来增加知觉负载，会减少无关干扰物的干扰。在三个实验中，我们独立于显示集的大小（呈现的字母数）来操纵提示集的大小（提示位置的数量）。增加显示集的大小会减少干扰物的干扰，无论额外的字母是否与任务相关。相比之下，增加提示集的大小会增加干扰物的干扰。这两个发现都与负载解释不一致，但与提出的两阶段稀释解释一致。
