Duncan Dock, Van der Stigchel Stefan
Department of Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2020 Feb;82(2):891-900. doi: 10.3758/s13414-019-01838-w.
Our ability to form predictions about the behavior of objects outside our focus of attention and to recognize when those expectations have been violated is critical to our survival. One principle that greatly influences our beliefs about unattended stimuli is that of constancy, or the tendency to assume objects outside our attention have remained constant, and the next time we attend to them they will be unchanged. Although this phenomenon is familiar from research on inattentional blindness, it is currently unclear when constancy is assumed and what conditions are adequate to convince us that unattended stimuli have likely undergone a change while outside of our attentional spotlight. Using a simple change-detection task, we sought to show that unattended stimuli are strongly predisposed to be perceived as unchanging when presented on constant, unchanging backgrounds; however, when stimuli were presented with significant incidental visual activity, participants were no longer biased towards change rejection. We found that participants were far more likely to report that a change had occurred if target presentation was accompanied by salient, incidental visual activity. We take these results to indicate that when an object is not represented in working memory, we use environmental conditions to judge whether or not these items are likely to have undergone a change or remained constant.
我们对注意力焦点之外的物体行为进行预测以及识别这些预期何时被违背的能力对我们的生存至关重要。一个极大影响我们对未被注意刺激物信念的原则是恒常性原则，即倾向于假定我们注意力之外的物体保持不变，并且下次我们关注它们时它们也不会改变。尽管这种现象在无意视盲的研究中很常见，但目前尚不清楚何时会假定恒常性，以及何种条件足以使我们相信未被注意的刺激物在处于我们注意力聚光灯之外时可能已经发生了变化。通过一个简单的变化检测任务，我们试图表明，当未被注意的刺激物呈现于恒定、不变的背景上时，它们极有可能被感知为未发生变化；然而，当刺激物伴随着显著的附带视觉活动呈现时，参与者不再倾向于拒绝变化。我们发现，如果目标呈现伴随着显著的附带视觉活动，参与者报告发生了变化的可能性要大得多。我们认为这些结果表明，当一个物体未在工作记忆中被表征时，我们利用环境条件来判断这些物体是否可能已经发生了变化或保持不变。
