Vromen Joyce M G, Lipp Ottmar V, Remington Roger W, Becker Stefanie I
School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, 4072, Australia.
School of Psychology and Speech Pathology, Curtin University, Bentley, WA, 6845, Australia.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2016 Oct;78(7):2266-79. doi: 10.3758/s13414-016-1142-3.
The rapid orienting of attention to potential threats has been proposed to proceed outside of top-down control. However, paradigms that have been used to investigate this have struggled to separate the rapid orienting of attention (i.e. capture) from the later disengagement of focal attention that may be subject to top-down control. Consequently, it remains unclear whether and to what extent orienting to threat is contingent on top-down goals. The current study manipulated the goal-relevance of threat distractors (spiders), whilst a strict top-down attentional set was encouraged by presenting the saliently colored target and the threat distracter simultaneously for a limited time. The goal-relevance of threatening distractors was manipulated by including a spider amongst the possible target stimuli (Experiment 1: spider/cat targets) or excluding it (Experiment 2: bird/fish targets). Orienting and disengagement were disentangled by cueing attention away from or towards the threat prior to its onset. The results indicated that the threatening spider distractors elicited rapid orienting of attention when spiders were potentially goal-relevant (Experiment 1) but did so much less when they were irrelevant to the task goal (Experiment 2). Delayed disengagement from the threat distractors was even more strongly contingent on the task goal and occurred only when a spider was a possible target. These results highlight the role of top-down goals in attentional orienting to and disengagement from threat.
有人提出，对潜在威胁的注意力快速定向是在自上而下的控制之外进行的。然而，用于研究这一现象的范式一直难以将注意力的快速定向（即捕获）与随后可能受自上而下控制的焦点注意力脱离区分开来。因此，尚不清楚对威胁的定向是否以及在多大程度上取决于自上而下的目标。本研究操纵了威胁干扰物（蜘蛛）与目标的相关性，同时通过在有限时间内同时呈现颜色突出的目标和威胁干扰物，鼓励形成严格的自上而下的注意力定势。通过在威胁出现之前将注意力从威胁上引开或引向威胁，来区分定向和脱离。结果表明，当蜘蛛可能与目标相关时（实验1：蜘蛛/猫目标），具有威胁性的蜘蛛干扰物会引发注意力的快速定向，但当它们与任务目标无关时（实验2：鸟/鱼目标），引发的程度要小得多。从威胁干扰物上延迟脱离甚至更强烈地取决于任务目标，并且只有当蜘蛛是可能的目标时才会发生。这些结果突出了自上而下的目标在对威胁的注意力定向和脱离中的作用。
