Agaoglu Sevda, Breitmeyer Bruno, Ogmen Haluk
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-4005, USA.
Center for Neuroengineering & Cognitive Science, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-4005, USA.
Vision (Basel). 2018 Oct 10;2(4):39. doi: 10.3390/vision2040039.
To efficiently use its finite resources, the visual system selects for further processing only a subset of the rich sensory information. Visual masking and spatial attention control the information transfer from visual sensory-memory to visual short-term memory. There is still a debate whether these two processes operate independently or interact, with empirical evidence supporting both arguments. However, recent studies pointed out that earlier studies showing significant interactions between common-onset masking and attention suffered from ceiling and/or floor effects. Our review of previous studies reporting metacontrast-attention interactions revealed similar artifacts. Therefore, we investigated metacontrast-attention interactions by using an experimental paradigm, in which ceiling/floor effects were avoided. We also examined whether metacontrast masking is differently influenced by endogenous and exogenous attention. We analyzed mean absolute-magnitude of response-errors and their statistical distribution. When targets are masked, our results support the hypothesis that manipulations of the levels of metacontrast and of endogenous/exogenous attention have largely independent effects. Moreover, statistical modeling of the distribution of response-errors suggests weak interactions modulating the probability of "guessing" behavior for some observers in both types of attention. Nevertheless, our data suggest that any joint effect of attention and metacontrast can be adequately explained by their independent and additive contributions.
为了有效利用其有限的资源，视觉系统仅选择丰富感官信息的一个子集进行进一步处理。视觉掩蔽和空间注意力控制着从视觉感觉记忆到视觉短期记忆的信息传递。关于这两个过程是独立运作还是相互作用仍存在争议，两种观点都有实证证据支持。然而，最近的研究指出，早期显示共同起始掩蔽和注意力之间存在显著相互作用的研究受到了天花板效应和/或地板效应的影响。我们对先前报道元对比 - 注意力相互作用的研究进行回顾，发现了类似的假象。因此，我们使用一种避免了天花板/地板效应的实验范式来研究元对比 - 注意力相互作用。我们还研究了内源性和外源性注意力对元对比掩蔽的影响是否不同。我们分析了反应误差的平均绝对大小及其统计分布。当目标被掩蔽时，我们的结果支持这样的假设，即元对比水平以及内源性/外源性注意力的操作具有很大程度上的独立效应。此外，对反应误差分布的统计建模表明，在两种类型的注意力中，对于一些观察者而言，存在微弱的相互作用调节“猜测”行为的概率。然而，我们的数据表明，注意力和元对比的任何联合效应都可以通过它们的独立和累加贡献得到充分解释。
