Colás Itsaso, Triviño Mónica, Chica Ana B
Laboratorio de Neurociencia Cognitiva, Departamento de Psicología Experimental, Centro de Investigación Mente Cerebro y Comportamiento, Universidad de GranadaGranada, Spain.
Servicio de Neuropsicología, Hospital Universitario San RafaelGranada, Spain.
Front Psychol. 2017 May 10;8:712. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00712. eCollection 2017.
The relation between attention and consciousness has been a controversial topic over the last decade. Although there seems to be an agreement on their distinction at the functional level, no consensus has been reached about attentional processes being or not necessary for conscious perception. Previous studies have explored the relation of alerting and orienting systems of attention and conscious perception, but the impact of the anterior executive attention system on conscious access remains unexplored. In the present study, we investigated the behavioral interaction between executive attention and conscious perception, testing control mechanisms both at stimulus-level representation and after error commission. We presented a classical Stroop task, manipulating the proportion of congruent and incongruent trials, and analyzed the effect of reactive and proactive control on the conscious perception of near-threshold stimuli. Reactive control elicited under high proportion congruent conditions influenced participants' decision criterion, whereas proactive control elicited under low proportion congruent conditions was ineffective in modulating conscious perception. In addition, error commission affected both perceptual sensitivity to detect near-threshold information and response criterion. These results suggest that reactivation of task goals through reactive control strategies in conflict situations impacts decision stages of conscious processing, whereas interference control elicited by error commission impacts both perceptual sensitivity and decision stages of conscious processing. We discuss the implications of our results for the gateway hypothesis about attention and consciousness, as they showed that interference control (both at stimulus-level representation and after error commission) can modulate the conscious access of near-threshold stimuli.
在过去十年中，注意力与意识之间的关系一直是一个备受争议的话题。尽管在功能层面上它们的区别似乎已达成共识，但对于有意识感知而言，注意力过程是否必要，尚未达成一致意见。以往的研究探讨了注意力的警觉和定向系统与有意识感知的关系，但前执行注意力系统对意识通达的影响仍未得到探索。在本研究中，我们调查了执行注意力与有意识感知之间的行为交互作用，在刺激水平表征和错误发生后测试控制机制。我们呈现了一个经典的斯特鲁普任务，操纵一致和不一致试验的比例，并分析反应性和前瞻性控制对近阈值刺激有意识感知的影响。在高比例一致条件下引发的反应性控制影响了参与者的决策标准，而在低比例一致条件下引发的前瞻性控制在调节有意识感知方面无效。此外，错误发生影响了检测近阈值信息的感知敏感性和反应标准。这些结果表明，在冲突情境中通过反应性控制策略重新激活任务目标会影响有意识加工的决策阶段，而错误发生引发的干扰控制会影响有意识加工的感知敏感性和决策阶段。我们讨论了我们的结果对注意力和意识的通道假说的影响，因为它们表明干扰控制（在刺激水平表征和错误发生后）可以调节近阈值刺激的意识通达。
