Lleras Alejandro, Chu Hengqing, Buetti Simona
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
J Exp Psychol Appl. 2017 Jun;23(2):158-179. doi: 10.1037/xap0000116. Epub 2017 Apr 17.
Perceptual Load theory states that the degree of perceptual load on a display determines the amount of leftover attentional resources that the system can use to process distracting information. An important corollary of this theory is that the amount of perceptual load determines the vulnerability of the attention system to being captured by completely irrelevant stimuli, predicting larger amounts of capture with low perceptual load than with high perceptual load. This prediction was first confirmed by Forster and Lavie (2008). Here, we report 6 experiments that followed up on those earlier results, where we find that in many cases, the opposite pattern is obtained: attentional capture increased with increasing perceptual load. Given the lack of generalizability of the theory to new experimental contexts with fairly minor methodological differences, we conclude that Perceptual Load may not be a useful framework for understanding attentional capture. The theoretical and applied importance of these findings is discussed. In particular, we caution against using this theory in applied tasks and settings because best-use recommendations stemming from this theory regarding strategies to decrease distractibility may in fact produce the opposite effect: an increase in distractibility (with distractibility being indexed by the magnitude of the capture effect). (PsycINFO Database Record
知觉负载理论认为，显示器上的知觉负载程度决定了系统可用于处理干扰信息的剩余注意力资源量。该理论的一个重要推论是，知觉负载量决定了注意力系统被完全无关刺激捕获的易感性，预测低知觉负载时的捕获量比高知觉负载时更大。这一预测首先由福斯特和拉维（2008年）证实。在此，我们报告了6个实验，对早期结果进行了跟进，我们发现在许多情况下，得到的是相反的模式：注意力捕获随着知觉负载的增加而增加。鉴于该理论在新的实验环境中缺乏普遍性，且方法上差异不大，我们得出结论，知觉负载可能不是理解注意力捕获的有用框架。讨论了这些发现的理论和应用重要性。特别是，我们告诫不要在应用任务和环境中使用该理论，因为源于该理论的关于减少分心策略的最佳使用建议实际上可能会产生相反的效果：分心增加（分心程度以捕获效应的大小为指标）。（PsycINFO数据库记录）
