Cognitive and Affective Psychophysiology Laboratory, Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Institute of Medical Psychology and Systems Neuroscience, University of Muenster, Muenster, Germany.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2019 Apr;26(2):468-490. doi: 10.3758/s13423-019-01568-y.
Despite its everyday ubiquity, not much is currently known about cognitive processes involved in flexible shifts of attention between external and internal information. An important model in the task-switching literature, which can serve as a blueprint for attentional flexibility, states that switch costs correspond to the time needed for a serial control mechanism to reallocate a limited resource from the previous task context to the current one. To formulate predictions from this model when applied to a switch between perceptual attention (external component) and working memory (WM; internal component), we first need to determine whether a single, serial control mechanism is in place and, subsequently, whether a limited resource is shared between them. Following a review of the literature, we predicted that a between-domain switch cost should be observed, and its size should be either similar or reduced compared to the standard, within-domain, switch cost. These latter two predictions derive from a shared resource account between external and internal attention or partial independence among them, respectively. In a second phase, we put to the test these opposing predictions in four successive behavioral experiments by means of a new paradigm suited to compare directly between- (internal to external) and within- (external to external) domain switch costs. Across them, we demonstrated the existence of a reliable between-domain switch cost whose magnitude was similar to the within-domain one, thereby lending support to the resource-sharing account.
尽管注意力在日常生活中无处不在，但目前对于在外部和内部信息之间灵活转换注意力的认知过程知之甚少。任务转换文献中的一个重要模型可以作为注意力灵活性的蓝图，该模型表明转换成本对应于串行控制机制将有限资源从先前任务上下文重新分配到当前任务上下文所需的时间。为了根据该模型对感知注意力（外部成分）和工作记忆（WM；内部成分）之间的转换进行预测，我们首先需要确定是否存在单一的串行控制机制，以及随后它们之间是否共享有限的资源。在回顾文献之后，我们预测应该会观察到域间切换成本，并且其大小应该与标准的、域内的切换成本相似或降低。后两个预测分别源自外部和内部注意力之间的共享资源账户或它们之间的部分独立性。在第二阶段，我们通过一种新的适合直接比较域间（内部到外部）和域内（外部到外部）切换成本的范式，在四个连续的行为实验中检验了这些相互矛盾的预测。在这些实验中，我们证明了存在可靠的域间切换成本，其大小与域内切换成本相似，从而支持资源共享账户。
