Elliott James C, Giesbrecht Barry
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2015 Apr 27;10(4):e0126203. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0126203. eCollection 2015.
Despite consistent evidence showing that attention is a multifaceted mechanism that can operate at multiple levels of processing depending on the structure and demands of the task, investigations of the attentional blink phenomenon have consistently shown that the impairment in reporting the second of two targets typically occurs at a late, or post-perceptual, stage of processing. This suggests that the attentional blink phenomenon may represent the operation of a unique attentional mechanism that is not as flexible as other attentional mechanisms. To test whether the attentional blink is a fixed or flexible phenomenon, we manipulated first target task demands (i.e., difficulty) and measured the influence this had on processing a subsequently presented distractor and the second target. If the attentional blink represents a mechanism that is fixed and consistently fails at a single stage of processing, then manipulations of task difficulty should not affect distractor processing. However, if the attentional blink represents a more multifaceted and flexible mechanism, then task difficulty should modulate distractor processing. The results revealed that distractor processing during the AB was attenuated under high task difficulty. In addition, unlike previous studies, we failed to find a correlation between distractor processing and the severity of the attentional blink. Using a simulation, we demonstrate that the previously reported correlations may have been spurious and due to using variables that were not independent. Overall, the present results support the conclusion that the selectivity of attention during the AB is flexible and depends on the structure and demands of the task.
尽管有持续的证据表明，注意力是一种多方面的机制，根据任务的结构和要求，它可以在多个处理层次上运作，但对注意瞬脱现象的研究一直表明，报告两个目标中的第二个目标时的受损情况通常发生在处理的后期，即后感知阶段。这表明注意瞬脱现象可能代表了一种独特的注意机制的运作，这种机制不像其他注意机制那样灵活。为了测试注意瞬脱是一种固定的还是灵活的现象，我们操纵了第一个目标的任务要求（即难度），并测量了这对处理随后呈现的干扰物和第二个目标的影响。如果注意瞬脱代表一种固定的机制，并且在单一处理阶段持续失败，那么任务难度的操纵应该不会影响干扰物处理。然而，如果注意瞬脱代表一种更具多面性和灵活性的机制，那么任务难度应该会调节干扰物处理。结果显示，在高任务难度下，注意瞬脱期间的干扰物处理会减弱。此外，与之前的研究不同，我们没有发现干扰物处理与注意瞬脱的严重程度之间存在相关性。通过模拟，我们证明之前报告的相关性可能是虚假的，并且是由于使用了不独立的变量。总体而言，目前的结果支持这样的结论，即注意瞬脱期间注意力的选择性是灵活的，并且取决于任务的结构和要求。
