Baruch Orit, Goldfarb Liat
The Institute for Information Processing and Decision Making (IIPDM), University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
E. J. Safra Brain Research Center for the Study of Learning Disabilities, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
Front Psychol. 2020 May 15;11:854. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00854. eCollection 2020.
Classical models of exogenous attention suggest that attentional enhancement at the focus of attention degrades gradually with distance from the attended location. On the other hand, the Attentional Attraction Field (AAF) model (Baruch and Yeshurun, 2014) suggests that the shift of receptive fields toward the attended location, reported by several physiological studies, leads to a decreased density of RFs at the attentional surrounds and hence the model predicts that the modulation of performance by spatial attention may have the shape of a Mexican Hat. Motivated by these theories, this study presents behavioral evidence in support of a Mexican Hat shaped modulation in exogenous spatial tasks that appears only at short latencies. In two experiments participants had to decide the location of a small gap in a target circle that was preceded by a non-informative attention capturing cue. The distance between cue and target and the latency between their onsets were varied. At short SOAs the performance curves were cubic and only at longer SOAs- this trend turned linear. Our results suggest that a rapid Mexican Hat modulation is an inherent property of the mechanism underlying exogenous attention and that a monotonically degrading trend, such as advocated by classical models, develops only at later stages of processing. The involvements of bottom-up processes such as the attraction of RFs to the focus of attention are further discussed.
外源性注意的经典模型表明，注意焦点处的注意增强会随着与被注意位置的距离增加而逐渐减弱。另一方面，注意吸引场（AAF）模型（Baruch和Yeshurun，2014）表明，多项生理学研究报告的感受野向被注意位置的移动，导致注意周围区域感受野密度降低，因此该模型预测，空间注意对表现的调节可能呈墨西哥帽形状。受这些理论的启发，本研究提供了行为证据，支持在外源性空间任务中仅在短潜伏期出现的墨西哥帽形状的调节。在两个实验中，参与者必须判断目标圆圈中一个小缺口的位置，该目标圆圈之前有一个非信息性的注意捕获线索。线索与目标之间的距离以及它们出现的潜伏期是变化的。在短刺激间隔时，表现曲线是三次方的，只有在较长刺激间隔时，这种趋势才变为线性。我们的结果表明，快速的墨西哥帽调节是外源性注意潜在机制的固有属性，而经典模型所主张的单调递减趋势仅在处理的后期阶段才会出现。本文还进一步讨论了自下而上的过程，如感受野向注意焦点的吸引。
