Burnett Katherine E, d'Avossa Giovanni, Sapir Ayelet
a School of Psychology , Bangor University , Bangor , UK.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2013;66(12):2363-75. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2013.780086. Epub 2013 Apr 10.
Exogenous attention is an involuntary, reflexive orienting response that results in enhanced processing at the attended location. The standard view is that this enhancement generalizes across visual properties of a stimulus. We test whether the size of an exogenous cue sets the attentional field and whether this leads to different effects on stimuli with different visual properties. In a dual task with a random-dot kinematogram (RDK) in each quadrant of the screen, participants discriminated the direction of moving dots in one RDK and localized one red dot. Precues were uninformative and consisted of either a large or a small luminance-change frame. The motion discrimination task showed attentional effects following both large and small exogenous cues. The red dot probe localization task showed attentional effects following a small cue, but not a large cue. Two additional experiments showed that the different effects on localization were not due to reduced spatial uncertainty or suppression of RDK dots in the surround. These results indicate that the effects of exogenous attention depend on the size of the cue and the properties of the task, suggesting the involvement of receptive fields with different sizes in different tasks. These attentional effects are likely to be driven by bottom-up mechanisms in early visual areas.
外源性注意是一种非自愿的、反射性的定向反应，它会导致在被注意位置的加工增强。标准观点认为，这种增强会推广到刺激的视觉属性上。我们测试外源性线索的大小是否设定了注意场，以及这是否会对具有不同视觉属性的刺激产生不同影响。在一个屏幕每个象限都有随机点运动图（RDK）的双重任务中，参与者辨别一个RDK中移动点的方向并定位一个红点。预线索是无信息的，由一个大的或小的亮度变化框架组成。运动辨别任务在大小两种外源性线索之后都显示出注意效应。红点探测定位任务在小线索之后显示出注意效应，但在大线索之后没有。另外两个实验表明，对定位的不同影响不是由于空间不确定性降低或周围RDK点的抑制。这些结果表明，外源性注意的影响取决于线索的大小和任务的属性，这表明在不同任务中涉及不同大小的感受野。这些注意效应可能是由早期视觉区域的自下而上机制驱动的。
