Feng Jing, Spence Ian
Department of Psychology, North Carolina State University, RaleighNC, United States.
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, TorontoON, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2017 Jun 7;8:888. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00888. eCollection 2017.
Frequently, we use expectations about likely locations of a target to guide the allocation of our attention. Despite the importance of this attentional process in everyday tasks, examination of pre-cueing effects on attention, particularly endogenous pre-cueing effects, has been relatively little explored outside an eccentricity of 20°. Given the visual field has functional subdivisions that attentional processes can differ significantly among the foveal, perifoveal, and more peripheral areas, how endogenous pre-cues that carry spatial information of targets influence our allocation of attention across a large visual field (especially in the more peripheral areas) remains unclear. We present two experiments examining how the expectation of the location of the target shapes the distribution of attention across eccentricities in the visual field. We measured participants' ability to pick out a target among distractors in the visual field after the presentation of a highly valid cue indicating the size of the area in which the target was likely to occur, or the likely direction of the target (left or right side of the display). Our first experiment showed that participants had a higher target detection rate with faster responses, particularly at eccentricities of 20° and 30°. There was also a marginal advantage of pre-cueing effects when trials of the same size cue were blocked compared to when trials were mixed. Experiment 2 demonstrated a higher target detection rate when the target occurred at the cued direction. This pre-cueing effect was greater at larger eccentricities and with a longer cue-target interval. Our findings on the endogenous pre-cueing effects across a large visual area were summarized using a simple model to assist in conceptualizing the modifications of the distribution of attention over the visual field. We discuss our finding in light of cognitive penetration of perception, and highlight the importance of examining attentional process across a large area of the visual field.
我们经常利用对目标可能位置的预期来引导注意力的分配。尽管这一注意力过程在日常任务中很重要，但在20°偏心率之外，对注意力的预提示效应，尤其是内源性预提示效应的研究相对较少。鉴于视野具有功能分区，注意力过程在中央凹、中央凹周围和更外围区域可能存在显著差异，携带目标空间信息的内源性预提示如何影响我们在大视野（尤其是更外围区域）中的注意力分配仍不清楚。我们进行了两个实验，研究目标位置的预期如何塑造视野中不同偏心率下的注意力分布。我们测量了参与者在呈现一个高度有效的提示后，在视野中的干扰物中挑选出目标的能力，该提示表明目标可能出现的区域大小或目标的可能方向（显示屏的左侧或右侧）。我们的第一个实验表明，参与者的目标检测率更高，反应更快，尤其是在偏心率为20°和30°时。与混合试验相比，当相同大小提示的试验被分组时，预提示效应也有微弱优势。实验2表明，当目标出现在提示方向时，目标检测率更高。这种预提示效应在更大的偏心率和更长的提示-目标间隔下更大。我们使用一个简单模型总结了在大视野区域上的内源性预提示效应的研究结果，以帮助概念化视野中注意力分布的变化。我们根据认知对感知的渗透来讨论我们的发现，并强调在大视野区域研究注意力过程的重要性。
