Sauter Marian, Liesefeld Heinrich René, Zehetleitner Michael, Müller Hermann J
Department of Psychology, General and Experimental Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany.
Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2018 Apr;80(3):622-642. doi: 10.3758/s13414-017-1477-4.
Shielding visual search against interference from salient distractors becomes more efficient over time for display regions where distractors appear more frequently, rather than only rarely Goschy, Bakos, Müller, & Zehetleitner (Frontiers in Psychology 5: 1195, 2014). We hypothesized that the locus of this learned distractor probability-cueing effect depends on the dimensional relationship of the to-be-inhibited distractor relative to the to-be-attended target. If the distractor and target are defined in different visual dimensions (e.g., a color-defined distractor and orientation-defined target, as in Goschy et al. (Frontiers in Psychology 5: 1195, 2014), distractors may be efficiently suppressed by down-weighting the feature contrast signals in the distractor-defining dimension Zehetleitner, Goschy, & Müller (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 38: 941-957, 2012), with stronger down-weighting being applied to the frequent- than to the rare-distractor region. However, given dimensionally coupled feature contrast signal weighting (cf. Müller J, Heller & Ziegler (Perception & Psychophysics 57:1-17, 1995), this dimension-(down-)weighting strategy would not be effective when the target and the distractors are defined within the same dimension. In this case, suppression may operate differently: by inhibiting the entire frequent-distractor region on the search-guiding master saliency map. The downside of inhibition at this level is that, although it reduces distractor interference in the inhibited (frequent-distractor) region, it also impairs target processing in that region-even when no distractor is actually present in the display. This predicted qualitative difference between same- and different-dimension distractors was confirmed in the present study (with 184 participants), thus furthering our understanding of the functional architecture of search guidance, especially regarding the mechanisms involved in shielding search from the interference of distractors that consistently occur in certain display regions.
对于干扰项更频繁出现的显示区域，随着时间推移，屏蔽视觉搜索免受显著干扰项的干扰会变得更加高效，而不是仅在干扰项很少出现的情况下才如此（戈施、巴科斯、米勒和泽赫特莱特纳，《心理学前沿》第5卷：1195页，2014年）。我们假设这种习得的干扰项概率提示效应的位点取决于待抑制的干扰项相对于待关注目标的维度关系。如果干扰项和目标是在不同的视觉维度中定义的（例如，如戈施等人（《心理学前沿》第5卷：1195页，2014年）所述，一个由颜色定义的干扰项和一个由方向定义的目标），干扰项可能通过降低干扰项定义维度中的特征对比信号来被有效地抑制（泽赫特莱特纳、戈施和米勒，《实验心理学杂志：人类知觉与表现》第38卷：941 - 957页，2012年），对频繁出现干扰项的区域应用的降权要比对罕见干扰项区域更强。然而，考虑到维度耦合的特征对比信号加权（参见米勒、赫勒和齐格勒（《知觉与心理物理学》第57卷：1 - 17页，1995年）），当目标和干扰项在同一维度中定义时，这种维度（降）加权策略将无效。在这种情况下，抑制可能以不同的方式运作：通过抑制搜索引导主显著性图上的整个频繁干扰项区域。这种水平的抑制的缺点是，虽然它减少了抑制区域（频繁干扰项区域）中的干扰项干扰，但它也损害了该区域中的目标处理——即使显示中实际上没有干扰项。本研究（有184名参与者）证实了同维度和不同维度干扰项之间这种预测的质的差异，从而进一步加深了我们对搜索引导功能架构的理解，特别是关于保护搜索免受在某些显示区域持续出现的干扰项干扰所涉及的机制。
