Petersen Anders, Petersen Annemarie Hilkjær, Bundesen Claus, Vangkilde Signe, Habekost Thomas
Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Center for Rehabilitation of Brain Injury, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Cognition. 2017 Aug;165:73-81. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.04.004. Epub 2017 May 11.
Phasic alertness refers to a short-lived change in the preparatory state of the cognitive system following an alerting signal. In the present study, we examined the effect of phasic auditory alerting on distinct perceptual processes, unconfounded by motor components. We combined an alerting/no-alerting design with a pure accuracy-based single-letter recognition task. Computational modeling based on Bundesen's Theory of Visual Attention was used to examine the effect of phasic alertness on visual processing speed and threshold of conscious perception. Results show that phasic auditory alertness affects visual perception by increasing the visual processing speed and lowering the threshold of conscious perception (Experiment 1). By manipulating the intensity of the alerting cue, we further observed a positive relationship between alerting intensity and processing speed, which was not seen for the threshold of conscious perception (Experiment 2). This was replicated in a third experiment, in which pupil size was measured as a physiological marker of alertness. Results revealed that the increase in processing speed was accompanied by an increase in pupil size, substantiating the link between alertness and processing speed (Experiment 3). The implications of these results are discussed in relation to a newly developed mathematical model of the relationship between levels of alertness and the speed with which humans process visual information.
阶段性警觉性是指在接收到警报信号后，认知系统准备状态的短暂变化。在本研究中，我们考察了阶段性听觉警报对不同知觉过程的影响，且不受运动成分的干扰。我们将警报/无警报设计与基于纯准确性的单字母识别任务相结合。基于邦德森视觉注意理论的计算模型被用于考察阶段性警觉性对视觉处理速度和意识知觉阈值的影响。结果表明，阶段性听觉警报通过提高视觉处理速度和降低意识知觉阈值来影响视觉感知（实验1）。通过操纵警报线索的强度，我们进一步观察到警报强度与处理速度之间存在正相关关系，而意识知觉阈值则未观察到这种关系（实验2）。这在第三个实验中得到了重复，在该实验中，测量了瞳孔大小作为警觉性的生理指标。结果显示，处理速度的提高伴随着瞳孔大小的增加，证实了警觉性与处理速度之间的联系（实验3）。我们结合新开发的关于警觉性水平与人类处理视觉信息速度之间关系的数学模型，讨论了这些结果的意义。
