Lechak Jennifer R, Leber Andrew B
Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire, Durham NH, USA.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2012 Feb 15;6:12. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00012. eCollection 2011 Nov 21.
Individuals differ substantially in their susceptibility to distraction by irrelevant visual information. Previous research has uncovered how individual variability in the goal-driven component of attentional control influences distraction, yet it remains unknown whether other sources of variability between individuals also predict distraction. In this fMRI study, we showed that an individual's inherent sensitivity to passively viewed visual motion predicts his/her susceptibility to distraction by motion. Bilateral MT/V5 was localized in participants during passive viewing of moving stimuli, affording a baseline measure of motion sensitivity. Next, participants performed a visual search task with an irrelevant motion singleton distractor, and both behavioral and neural indices of distraction were recorded. Results revealed that both of these indices were predicted by the independent index of motion sensitivity. An additional analysis of moment-to-moment fluctuations in distraction within individuals revealed that distraction could be predicted by pretrial fMRI activity in several brain regions, including MT+, which likely reflected the observer's momentary propensity to process motion. Together, these results shed light on how variability in factors other than goal-driven processing, both within and between individuals, affects attentional control and one's perception of the visual world.
个体在受到无关视觉信息干扰的易感性方面存在很大差异。先前的研究已经揭示了注意力控制的目标驱动成分中的个体差异是如何影响干扰的，但个体之间其他差异来源是否也能预测干扰仍不清楚。在这项功能磁共振成像（fMRI）研究中，我们发现个体对被动观看的视觉运动的固有敏感性可以预测其受运动干扰的易感性。在参与者被动观看移动刺激时，对双侧MT/V5进行了定位，从而获得了运动敏感性的基线测量值。接下来，参与者执行一项带有无关运动单独干扰物的视觉搜索任务，并记录了干扰的行为和神经指标。结果显示，这两个指标均由运动敏感性的独立指标预测。对个体内部干扰的瞬间波动进行的额外分析表明，干扰可以通过包括MT+在内的几个脑区的fMRI活动进行预测，这可能反映了观察者处理运动的瞬间倾向。总之,这些结果揭示了除目标驱动加工之外，个体内部和个体之间的其他因素的变异性是如何影响注意力控制以及个体对视觉世界的感知的。
