Zang Xuelian, Assumpção Leonardo, Wu Jiao, Xie Xiaowei, Zinchenko Artyom
Center for Cognition and Brain Disorders, Affiliated Hospital of Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China.
Institute of Psychological Sciences, College of Education, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China.
Front Psychol. 2021 May 21;12:675848. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.675848. eCollection 2021.
In the contextual cueing task, visual search is faster for targets embedded in invariant displays compared to targets found in variant displays. However, it has been repeatedly shown that participants do not learn repeated contexts when these are irrelevant to the task. One potential explanation lays in the idea of , where salient cues (task-relevant old items) block the learning of invariant associations in the task-irrelevant subset of items. An alternative explanation is that the associative blocking rather hinders the allocation of attention to task-irrelevant subsets, but not the learning . The current work examined these two explanations. In two experiments, participants performed a visual search task under a rapid presentation condition (300 ms) in Experiment 1, or under a longer presentation condition (2,500 ms) in Experiment 2. In both experiments, the search items within both old and new displays were presented in two colors which defined the irrelevant and task-relevant items within each display. The participants were asked to search for the target in the relevant subset in the learning phase. In the transfer phase, the instructions were reversed and task-irrelevant items became task-relevant (and vice versa). In line with previous studies, the search of task-irrelevant subsets resulted in no cueing effect post-transfer in the longer presentation condition; however, a reliable cueing effect was generated by task-irrelevant subsets learned under the rapid presentation. These results demonstrate that under rapid display presentation, global attentional selection leads to global context learning. However, under a longer display presentation, global attention is blocked, leading to the exclusive learning of invariant relevant items in the learning session.
在情境线索任务中，与出现在可变显示中的目标相比，嵌入不变显示中的目标的视觉搜索速度更快。然而，反复表明，当这些上下文与任务无关时，参与者不会学习重复的上下文。一种可能的解释在于这样一种观点，即显著线索（与任务相关的旧项目）会阻碍在与任务无关的项目子集中学习不变关联。另一种解释是，联想性阻断反而会阻碍将注意力分配到与任务无关的子集上，而不是学习。当前的研究检验了这两种解释。在两个实验中，参与者在实验1的快速呈现条件（300毫秒）下或在实验2的较长呈现条件（2500毫秒）下执行视觉搜索任务。在两个实验中，旧显示和新显示中的搜索项目都以两种颜色呈现，这两种颜色定义了每个显示中的无关项目和与任务相关的项目。在学习阶段，要求参与者在相关子集中搜索目标。在转移阶段，指令被颠倒，与任务无关的项目变成与任务相关的（反之亦然）。与先前的研究一致，在较长呈现条件下，对与任务无关的子集的搜索在转移后没有产生线索效应；然而，在快速呈现条件下学习的与任务无关的子集产生了可靠的线索效应。这些结果表明，在快速显示呈现下，全局注意力选择会导致全局上下文学习。然而，在较长显示呈现下，全局注意力被阻断，导致在学习过程中仅学习不变的相关项目。
