Król Magdalena Ewa, Król Michał
Wrocław Faculty of Psychology, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland.
Department of Economics, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2017 Jul 10;12(7):e0180573. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0180573. eCollection 2017.
Predictions optimize processing by reducing attentional resources allocation to expected or predictable sensory data. Our study demonstrates that these saved processing resources can be then used on concurrent stimuli, and in consequence improve their processing and encoding. We illustrate this "trickle-down" effect with a dual task, where the primary task varied in terms of predictability. The primary task involved detection of a pre-specified symbol that appeared at some point of a short video of a dot moving along a random, semi-predictable or predictable trajectory. The concurrent secondary task involved memorization of photographs representing either emotionally neutral or non-neutral (social or threatening) content. Performance in the secondary task was measured by a memory test. We found that participants allocated more attention to unpredictable (random and semi-predictable) stimuli than to predictable stimuli. Additionally, when the stimuli in the primary task were more predictable, participants performed better in the secondary task, as evidenced by higher sensitivity in the memory test. Finally, social or threatening stimuli were allocated more "looking time" and a larger number of saccades than neutral stimuli. This effect was stronger for the threatening stimuli than social stimuli. Thus, predictability of environmental input is used in optimizing the allocation of attentional resources, which trickles-down and benefits the processing of concurrent stimuli.
预测通过减少对预期或可预测的感官数据的注意力资源分配来优化处理过程。我们的研究表明，这些节省下来的处理资源随后可用于同时出现的刺激，并因此改善对它们的处理和编码。我们通过一个双重任务来说明这种“涓滴”效应，其中主要任务在可预测性方面有所不同。主要任务是检测一个预先指定的符号，该符号出现在一个点沿着随机、半可预测或可预测轨迹移动的短视频的某个时刻。同时进行的次要任务是记忆代表情感中性或非中性（社交或威胁性）内容的照片。次要任务的表现通过记忆测试来衡量。我们发现，与可预测的刺激相比，参与者会将更多注意力分配到不可预测的（随机和半可预测的）刺激上。此外，当主要任务中的刺激更具可预测性时，参与者在次要任务中的表现更好，记忆测试中的更高敏感性证明了这一点。最后，与中性刺激相比，社交或威胁性刺激被分配了更多的“注视时间”和更多的扫视次数。这种效应在威胁性刺激上比社交刺激上更强。因此，环境输入的可预测性被用于优化注意力资源的分配，这种分配会产生涓滴效应并有利于同时出现的刺激的处理。
