Failing Michel, Wang Benchi, Theeuwes Jan
Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Van der Boechorststraat 1, 1081 BT, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Institute of Brain and Behavior Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2019 Jul;81(5):1405-1414. doi: 10.3758/s13414-019-01704-9.
Where and what we attend to is not only determined by what we are currently looking for but also by what we have encountered in the past. Recent studies suggest that biasing the probability by which distractors appear at locations in visual space may lead to attentional suppression of high-probability distractor locations, which effectively reduces capture by a distractor but also impairs target selection at this location. However, in many of these studies introducing a high-probability distractor location was equivalent to increasing the probability of the target appearing in any of the other locations (i.e., the low-probability distractor locations). Here, we investigate an alternative interpretation of previous findings according to which attentional selection at high-probability distractor locations is not suppressed but selection at low-probability distractor locations is facilitated. In two visual search tasks, we found no evidence for this hypothesis: there was no evidence for spatial suppression when only target probabilities were biased (Experiment 1), nor did the spatial suppression disappear when only the distractor probabilities were biased while the target probabilities were equal (Experiment 2). We conclude that recurrent presentation of a distractor in a specific location leads to attentional suppression of that location through a mechanism that is unaffected by any regularities regarding the target position.
我们关注的位置和内容不仅取决于我们当前正在寻找的东西，还取决于我们过去所遇到的情况。最近的研究表明，通过改变干扰项在视觉空间中出现位置的概率，可能会导致对高概率干扰项位置的注意力抑制，这虽然能有效减少干扰项的捕获，但也会损害该位置的目标选择。然而，在许多此类研究中，引入高概率干扰项位置等同于增加目标出现在任何其他位置（即低概率干扰项位置）的概率。在此，我们研究了对先前研究结果的另一种解释，即高概率干扰项位置的注意力选择并未受到抑制，而是低概率干扰项位置的选择得到了促进。在两项视觉搜索任务中，我们未找到支持该假设的证据：当仅改变目标概率时，没有空间抑制的证据（实验1）；当目标概率相等且仅改变干扰项概率时，空间抑制也未消失（实验2）。我们得出结论，干扰项在特定位置的反复呈现会通过一种不受目标位置任何规律影响的机制，导致对该位置的注意力抑制。
