Asanowicz Dariusz, Marzecová Anna
Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.
Institute of Psychology, University of Leipzig, Germany.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2017 May;176:58-70. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2017.03.004. Epub 2017 Apr 2.
The study examined how alerting and executive attention interact in a task involving conflict resolution. We proposed a tentative scenario in which an initial exogenous phasic alerting phase is followed by an endogenous tonic alerting phase, and hypothesized that these two processes may have distinct effects on conflict resolution. Phasic alerting was expected to increase the conflict, whereas tonic alerting was expected to decrease the conflict. Three experiments were conducted using different variants of the flanker task with visual alerting cues and varied cue-target intervals (SOA), to differentiate between effects of phasic alerting (short SOA) and tonic alerting (long SOA). The results showed that phasic alerting consistently decreased the efficiency of conflict resolution indexed by response time and accuracy, whereas tonic alerting increased the accuracy of conflict resolution, but at a cost in the speed of processing the conflict. The third experiment additionally showed that the effects of phasic alerting may be modulated by the psychophysical strength of alerting cues. Discussed are possible mechanisms that could account for the observed interactions between alerting and conflict resolution, as well as some discrepancies between the current and previous studies.
该研究考察了在一项涉及冲突解决的任务中，警觉和执行性注意是如何相互作用的。我们提出了一个初步设想，即最初的外源性相位警觉阶段之后是内源性持续性警觉阶段，并假设这两个过程可能对冲突解决有不同的影响。相位警觉预计会增加冲突，而持续性警觉预计会减少冲突。使用侧翼任务的不同变体，结合视觉警觉线索和不同的线索-目标间隔（刺激呈现间隔，SOA）进行了三项实验，以区分相位警觉（短SOA）和持续性警觉（长SOA）的影响。结果表明，相位警觉持续降低了以反应时间和准确性为指标的冲突解决效率，而持续性警觉提高了冲突解决的准确性，但代价是处理冲突的速度。第三个实验还表明，相位警觉的影响可能会受到警觉线索心理物理强度的调节。文中讨论了可能解释所观察到的警觉与冲突解决之间相互作用的机制，以及当前研究与以往研究之间的一些差异。
