Department of Ergonomics, Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors, Ardeystr. 67, D-44139, Dortmund, Germany.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2018 Aug;25(4):1358-1364. doi: 10.3758/s13423-017-1382-9.
A substantial amount of evidence indicates that surprising events capture attention. The present study was primarily intended to investigate whether expectancy discrepant depth information also is able to capture attention immediately and-more specifically-whether cues that are relatively closer or farther differentially modulate behavior. For this purpose, participants had to identify one of two target letters in a search display. Stimulus positions were initially cued by uninformative placeholders. After half of the trials, the cue at the target position was suddenly and unexpectedly (critical trial) displayed closer to or farther from the observer. In line with previous research, both depth cues captured attention on their very first appearance. Performance in the critical trial was superior to the error rates in the trials without depth cue and was even above the performance in subsequent trials that included depth cue. This effect was only observed when the cue preceded the target by 400 ms. Using a shorter cue-stimulus interval of 100 ms, only a delayed improvement was observed, which denotes a typical feature of surprise capture. Moreover, response times were faster in trials comprising a depth cue, and this was already true for the critical trial. Apart from that, no other marked differences between near and far depth cues were observed. Therefore, the present results emphasize that surprising depth information indeed captures attention. However, in contrast to other perceptual tasks, search performance was not considerably influenced by relative position in depth.
大量证据表明，出人意料的事件会吸引注意力。本研究主要旨在探究期望违背的深度信息是否也能够立即捕获注意力，更具体地说，是否相对较近或较远的线索会以不同的方式调节行为。为此，参与者必须在搜索显示中识别两个目标字母之一。刺激位置最初由无信息占位符提示。在一半的试验之后，目标位置的线索突然且出人意料地（关键试验）显示得更近或更远。与先前的研究一致，两种深度线索在首次出现时都能吸引注意力。关键试验的表现优于没有深度线索的试验中的错误率，甚至优于后续包括深度线索的试验中的表现。只有当线索在目标之前 400 毫秒时，才会观察到这种效果。使用较短的线索-刺激间隔 100 毫秒，仅观察到延迟的改善，这表示惊喜捕获的典型特征。此外，包含深度线索的试验中反应时间更快，这在关键试验中也是如此。除此之外，没有观察到近和远深度线索之间的其他明显差异。因此，本研究结果强调，出人意料的深度信息确实会吸引注意力。然而，与其他感知任务不同，搜索性能不受深度中相对位置的显著影响。
