Cognitive Psychology Unit, Leiden University, The Netherlands; University of Akureyri, Iceland.
Cognitive Psychology Unit, Leiden University, The Netherlands.
Cognition. 2017 Nov;168:191-204. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.07.001. Epub 2017 Jul 11.
Arousal sometimes enhances and sometimes impairs perception and memory. A recent theory attempts to reconcile these findings by proposing that arousal amplifies the competition between stimulus representations, strengthening already strong representations and weakening already weak representations. Here, we report a stringent test of this arousal-biased competition theory in the context of focused visuospatial attention. Participants were required to identify a briefly presented target in the context of multiple distractors, which varied in the degree to which they competed for representation with the target, as revealed by psychophysics. We manipulated arousal using emotionally arousing pictures (Experiment 1), alerting tones (Experiment 2) and white-noise stimulation (Experiment 3), and validated these manipulations with electroencephalography and pupillometry. In none of the experiments did we find evidence that arousal modulated the effect of distractor competition on the accuracy of target identification. Bayesian statistics revealed moderate to strong evidence against arousal-biased competition. Modeling of the psychophysical data based on Bundesen's (1990) theory of visual attention corroborated the conclusion that arousal does not bias competition in focused visuospatial attention.
唤醒有时会增强，有时会损害感知和记忆。最近的一种理论试图通过提出唤醒放大了刺激表示之间的竞争来调和这些发现，从而增强已经强的表示，削弱已经弱的表示。在这里，我们在集中的视觉注意力的背景下，对这种唤醒偏向竞争的理论进行了严格的测试。参与者被要求在多个干扰物的背景下识别一个短暂呈现的目标，这些干扰物与目标竞争表示的程度通过心理物理学来揭示。我们使用情绪唤醒的图片（实验 1）、警示音（实验 2）和白噪声刺激（实验 3）来操纵唤醒，并通过脑电图和瞳孔测量来验证这些操纵。在所有实验中，我们都没有发现证据表明唤醒调节了干扰竞争对目标识别准确性的影响。贝叶斯统计显示，有中等至强的证据反对唤醒偏向竞争。基于 Bundesen（1990 年）视觉注意理论的心理物理学数据建模证实了唤醒不会偏向集中的视觉注意力竞争的结论。
