Gronau Nurit, Izoutcheev Anna
Department of Psychology & Cognitive Science Studies, The Open University of Israel.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2017 May;43(5):954-970. doi: 10.1037/xhp0000365. Epub 2017 Mar 2.
The extent to which scenes are categorized and understood in the absence of attention has been the focus of a continuous debate over the last decade. Most studies investigating this question have used experimental paradigms in which participants explicitly searched for a certain scene category, or alternatively, scenes were task-irrelevant yet their identity was explicitly reported by participants. Although the first type of studies may have overestimated unattended scene processing, the latter type of studies may have underestimated scene processing due to the reliance on subjective response criteria and on working memory capacity limits. The present research examined scene processing by using an implicit, online behavioral measure which assessed the influence of both task-relevant (i.e., to-be-detected) and task-irrelevant distractor scenes on behavior. The effect of scene categorization was compared when scenes were fully attended (Experiment 1) versus when they were positioned in an unattended location and served as relevant/irrelevant distractors (Experiments 2 and 3). Our results demonstrated that in contrast to attended scenes, unattended distractor scenes which were not part of one's task-set were not automatically categorized and did not exert influence on performance. Critically, however, the very same scene distractors affected behavior when they contained a to-be-detected category, suggesting a qualitative dissociation between task-relevant and task-irrelevant distractors. Our study provides a systematic examination of scene distractor processing outside the focus of visual attention and a framework that may reconcile previous conflicting evidence. (PsycINFO Database Record
在过去十年中，场景在注意力缺失情况下的分类和理解程度一直是持续争论的焦点。大多数研究这个问题的实验范式是，让参与者明确搜索特定场景类别，或者场景与任务无关，但参与者需明确报告其身份。尽管第一种类型的研究可能高估了未被注意的场景处理能力，但后一种类型的研究可能由于依赖主观反应标准和工作记忆容量限制而低估了场景处理能力。本研究通过使用一种隐含的在线行为测量方法来检验场景处理，该方法评估了与任务相关（即要检测的）和与任务无关的干扰场景对行为的影响。比较了场景完全被注意时（实验1）与场景位于未被注意位置并作为相关/不相关干扰物时（实验2和3）的场景分类效果。我们的结果表明，与被注意的场景不同，不属于任务集一部分的未被注意的干扰场景不会自动分类，也不会对表现产生影响。然而，至关重要的是，当相同的场景干扰物包含要检测的类别时，它们会影响行为，这表明与任务相关和与任务无关的干扰物之间存在质的差异。我们的研究对视觉注意焦点之外的场景干扰物处理进行了系统检验，并提供了一个可能调和先前相互矛盾证据的框架。（PsycINFO数据库记录）
