Eimer Martin, Grubert Anna
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK.
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK.
Conscious Cogn. 2015 Sep;35:274-81. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2015.01.001. Epub 2015 Jan 22.
Previous electrophysiological studies have shown that attentional selection processes are highly sensitive to the temporal order of task-relevant visual events. When two successively presented colour-defined target stimuli are separated by a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of only 10 ms, the onset latencies of N2pc components to these stimuli (which reflect their attentional selection) precisely match their objective temporal separation. We tested whether such small onset differences are accessible to conscious awareness by instructing participants to report the category (letter or digit) of the first of two target-colour items that were separated by an SOA of 10, 20, or 30 ms. Performance was at chance level for the 10 ms SOA, demonstrating that temporal order information which is available to attentional control processes cannot be utilized for conscious temporal order judgments. These results provide new evidence that selective attention and conscious awareness are functionally separable, and support the hypothesis that attention and awareness operate at different stages of cognitive processing.
以往的电生理研究表明，注意选择过程对与任务相关的视觉事件的时间顺序高度敏感。当两个相继呈现的颜色定义目标刺激仅被10毫秒的刺激起始异步（SOA）隔开时，N2pc成分对这些刺激的起始潜伏期（反映它们的注意选择）与它们的客观时间间隔精确匹配。我们通过指示参与者报告两个目标颜色项目中第一个项目的类别（字母或数字）来测试这种微小的起始差异是否能被意识所察觉，这两个目标颜色项目的SOA为10、20或30毫秒。对于10毫秒的SOA，表现处于随机水平，这表明可用于注意控制过程的时间顺序信息不能用于有意识的时间顺序判断。这些结果提供了新的证据，表明选择性注意和意识在功能上是可分离的，并支持了注意和意识在认知加工的不同阶段起作用的假设。
