Faculty of Education and Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
Int J Psychophysiol. 2012 May;84(2):155-63. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2012.02.001. Epub 2012 Feb 15.
Stimulus-focused attention enhances the processing of auditory stimuli, which is indicated by enhanced neural activity. In situations where fast responses are required, attention may not only serve as a means to gain more information about the relevant stimulus, but it may provide a processing speed gain as well. In two experiments we investigated whether attentional focusing decreased the latency of the auditory N1 event related potential. In Experiment 1 slowly emerging, soft (20dB sensation level) sounds were presented in two conditions, in which participants performed a sound-detection task or watched a silent movie and ignored the sounds. N1 latency was shorter in the sound-detection task in comparison to the ignore condition. In Experiment 2 we investigated whether the attentional N1 latency-decrease was caused by a frequency-specific attentional preparation or not. To this end, tone sequences were presented with a single tone frequency or with four different frequencies. N1 latency was shorter in the sound-detection task in comparison to the ignore condition regardless the number of frequencies. These results suggest that stimulus-focused attention increases stimulus processing speed by generally increasing sensory gain.
刺激焦点注意增强了听觉刺激的处理，这表现为增强的神经活动。在需要快速反应的情况下，注意不仅可以作为获取有关刺激的更多信息的手段，而且还可以提供处理速度增益。在两项实验中，我们研究了注意力集中是否会降低听觉 N1 事件相关电位的潜伏期。在实验 1 中，缓慢出现的柔和声音（20dB 感觉水平）在两种条件下呈现，参与者在其中执行声音检测任务或观看无声电影并忽略声音。与忽略条件相比，在声音检测任务中 N1 潜伏期更短。在实验 2 中，我们研究了注意力 N1 潜伏期的减少是否是由于频率特异性注意力准备引起的。为此，用单个音调频率或四个不同频率呈现音调序列。与忽略条件相比，无论频率如何，在声音检测任务中 N1 潜伏期都更短。这些结果表明，刺激焦点注意通过普遍增加感觉增益来提高刺激处理速度。
