Vatterott Daniel B, Mozer Michael C, Vecera Shaun P
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Iowa, W311 Seashore Hall, Iowa City, IA, 52242-1407, USA.
Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, 80309-0430, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2018 Feb;80(2):485-499. doi: 10.3758/s13414-017-1465-8.
Distraction impairs performance of many important, everyday tasks. Attentional control limits distraction by preferentially selecting important items for limited-capacity cognitive operations. Research in attentional control has typically investigated the degree to which selection of items is stimulus-driven versus goal-driven. Recent work finds that when observers initially learn a task, the selection is based on stimulus-driven factors, but through experience, goal-driven factors have an increasing influence. The modulation of selection by goals has been studied within the paradigm of learned distractor rejection, in which experience over a sequence of trials enables individuals eventually to ignore a perceptually salient distractor. The experiments presented examine whether observers can generalize learned distractor rejection to novel distractors. Observers searched for a target and ignored a salient color-singleton distractor that appeared in half of the trials. In Experiment 1, observers who learned distractor rejection in a variable environment rejected a novel distractor more effectively than observers who learned distractor rejection in a less variable, homogeneous environment, demonstrating that variable, heterogeneous stimulus environments encourage generalizable learned distractor rejection. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated the time course of learned distractor rejection across the experiment and found that after experiencing four color-singleton distractors in different blocks, observers could effectively reject subsequent novel color-singleton distractors. These results suggest that the optimization of attentional control to the task environment can be interpreted as a form of learning, demonstrating experience's critical role in attentional control.
注意力分散会损害许多重要的日常任务的表现。注意力控制通过优先选择重要项目进行容量有限的认知操作来限制注意力分散。注意力控制方面的研究通常调查项目选择在多大程度上是由刺激驱动的还是目标驱动的。最近的研究发现，当观察者最初学习一项任务时，选择是基于刺激驱动因素，但通过经验，目标驱动因素的影响越来越大。目标对选择的调节作用已在学习性干扰物抑制范式中进行了研究，在该范式中，一系列试验中的经验使个体最终能够忽略一个在感知上很突出的干扰物。本文呈现的实验研究了观察者是否能将学习到的干扰物抑制推广到新的干扰物上。观察者搜索一个目标，并忽略在一半试验中出现的一个突出的颜色单一干扰物。在实验1中，在可变环境中学习干扰物抑制的观察者比在变化较小、较为单一的环境中学习干扰物抑制的观察者更有效地拒绝了新的干扰物，这表明可变的、异质的刺激环境会促进可推广的学习性干扰物抑制。实验2和实验3研究了整个实验过程中学习性干扰物抑制的时间进程，发现观察者在不同组块中经历了四个颜色单一干扰物后，能够有效地拒绝随后出现的新的颜色单一干扰物。这些结果表明，将注意力控制优化到任务环境可以被解释为一种学习形式，证明了经验在注意力控制中的关键作用。
