Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany.
PLoS One. 2012;7(7):e41257. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0041257. Epub 2012 Jul 18.
Temporal allocation of attention is often investigated with a paradigm in which two relevant target items are presented in a rapid sequence of irrelevant distractors. The term Attentional Blink (AB) denotes a transient impairment of awareness for the second of these two target items when presented close in time. Experimental studies reported that the AB is reduced when the second target is emotionally significant, suggesting a modulation of attention allocation. The aim of the present study was to systematically investigate the influence of target-distractor similarity on AB magnitude for faces with emotional expressions under conditions of limited attention in a series of six rapid serial visual presentation experiments. The task on the first target was either to discriminate the gender of a neutral face (Experiments 1, 3-6) or an indoor/outdoor visual scene (Experiment 2). The task on the second target required either the detection of emotional expressions (Experiments 1-5) or the detection of a face (Experiment 6). The AB was minimal or absent when targets could be easily discriminated from each other. Three successive experiments revealed that insufficient masking and target-distractor similarity could account for the observed immunity of faces against the AB in the first two experiments. An AB was present but not increased when the facial expression was irrelevant to the task suggesting that target-distractor similarity plays a more important role in eliciting an AB than the attentional set demanded by the specific task. In line with previous work, emotional faces were less affected by the AB.
注意的时间分配通常通过一种范式进行研究，在这种范式中，两个相关的目标项目在无关的分心物的快速序列中呈现。术语“注意瞬脱（Attentional Blink，AB）”表示当这两个目标项目在时间上接近时，对第二个目标项目的意识会短暂受损。实验研究报告说，当第二个目标具有情感意义时，AB 会减少，这表明注意力分配会受到调节。本研究的目的是在一系列六个快速系列视觉呈现实验中，在注意力有限的情况下，系统地研究具有情感表达的面孔的目标-分心物相似性对 AB 幅度的影响。第一个目标的任务是要么辨别中性面孔的性别（实验 1、3-6），要么辨别室内/室外视觉场景（实验 2）。第二个目标的任务是要么检测情绪表达（实验 1-5），要么检测面孔（实验 6）。当目标之间可以轻松区分时，AB 最小或不存在。三个连续的实验表明，在头两个实验中，不充分的掩蔽和目标-分心物的相似性可以解释面孔对 AB 的免疫现象。当面部表情与任务无关时，AB 存在但没有增加，这表明目标-分心物的相似性在引起 AB 方面比特定任务所需的注意定势更为重要。与之前的工作一致，情绪面孔受 AB 的影响较小。
