Department of Psychology, McCausland Center for Brain Imaging, and Institute for Mind and Brain, University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA.
Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.
Cogn Neurosci. 2020 Jan;11(1-2):24-36. doi: 10.1080/17588928.2019.1662387. Epub 2019 Sep 12.
Observers often take longer to respond to a visual target when it appears at a recently stimulated location than when it appears at a new location in the visual field. This behavioral impairment - known as inhibition of return (IOR) - is mirrored by a reduction of an event-related potential (ERP) component called the N2pc that has been associated with attentional selection. Together, these findings indicate that the mechanism underlying IOR operates to bias covert attention against re-visiting the most recently attended location. The goal of the present study was to determine how this inhibitory attention bias evolves across successive trials of a two-item search task. Initially, targets appearing at previously attended locations were associated with behavioral IOR and a concomitant reduction of the N2pc. After several successive trials, this initial inhibitory bias was superseded by expectancy-based biases associated with "predictable" inter-trial patterns of location repeats or location changes, in some cases leading to faster responses and a larger N2pc when the target location repeated (facilitation of return). These results provide evidence that biases in the covert deployment of attention are updated dynamically according to the recent selection history and contribute to well-known sequential effects in serial choice reaction-time tasks.
当视觉目标出现在最近被刺激的位置时，观察者往往比出现在视野中新位置时需要更长的时间来做出反应。这种行为障碍——称为返回抑制（IOR）——反映在与注意力选择相关的事件相关电位（ERP）成分 N2pc 的减少上。这些发现表明，IOR 背后的机制作用是偏向于将隐蔽注意力转移到最近被注意的位置之外。本研究的目的是确定在两项搜索任务的连续试验中，这种抑制性注意力偏向是如何演变的。最初，出现在先前被注意位置的目标与行为 IOR 以及 N2pc 的相应减少有关。在几次连续的试验后，这种最初的抑制性偏差被与“可预测”的试验间位置重复或位置变化模式相关的基于期望的偏差所取代，在某些情况下，当目标位置重复时（返回促进），反应速度更快，N2pc 更大。这些结果提供了证据，表明隐蔽注意力的部署偏向根据最近的选择历史动态更新，并有助于串行选择反应时任务中众所周知的序列效应。
