Inukai Tomoe, Kawahara Jun I
Department of Psychology, Kobe Shinwa Women's University, Kobe, Japan.
Department of Psychology, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan.
Front Psychol. 2018 Oct 12;9:1893. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01893. eCollection 2018.
The accuracy of detecting or identifying a target decreases when a salient distractor is presented. This decrease is explained by the temporal or spatial diversion of attention to the distractor and thus is referred to as attentional capture. Using temporal and spatial visual search tasks, we examined whether there are sex differences in attentional capture. In Experiment 1A, a temporal visual search task measured attentional capture in the temporal domain by asking participants (97 men and 92 women) to identify a target embedded in a rapid stream of nontarget letters while ignoring a preceding peripheral distractor. In Experiment 2, a spatial visual search task measured attentional capture in the spatial domain by asking participants (146 men and 83 women) to detect a target among spatially distributed nontarget items while ignoring a distractor presented simultaneously. Our results indicate that attentional capture occurred in both tasks. In Experiment 1A, the magnitude of capture was significantly larger for women than men. In Experiment 1B, we confirmed sex differences in temporal attentional capture by recruiting a new set of participants (141 men and 85 women). In Experiment 2, the magnitude of capture was comparable between the sexes. These results suggest that women are more sensitive to bottom-up signals than men when they engage in a temporal search task and could be explained in terms of sex differences in the ability of adjusting the size of attentional window, within which attention is allocated to the most salient item.
当呈现一个显著的干扰物时，检测或识别目标的准确性会降低。这种降低是由于注意力在时间或空间上被转移到干扰物上，因此被称为注意力捕获。我们使用时间和空间视觉搜索任务，研究了注意力捕获是否存在性别差异。在实验1A中，一个时间视觉搜索任务通过要求参与者（97名男性和92名女性）在忽略先前的外周干扰物的同时，在快速流动的非目标字母流中识别一个目标，来测量时间域中的注意力捕获。在实验2中，一个空间视觉搜索任务通过要求参与者（146名男性和83名女性）在忽略同时呈现的干扰物的同时，在空间分布的非目标项目中检测一个目标，来测量空间域中的注意力捕获。我们的结果表明，在这两个任务中都发生了注意力捕获。在实验1A中，女性的捕获幅度显著大于男性。在实验1B中，我们通过招募一组新的参与者（141名男性和85名女性）证实了时间注意力捕获中的性别差异。在实验2中，两性之间的捕获幅度相当。这些结果表明，女性在进行时间搜索任务时比男性对自下而上的信号更敏感，这可以从调整注意力窗口大小的能力的性别差异方面来解释，在这个窗口内，注意力被分配到最显著的项目上。
