Department of Neurosciences, Biomedicine and Movement Sciences, University of Verona, Verona, Italy.
Section of Physiology and Psychology, Department of Neurosciences, Biomedicine and Movement Sciences, University of Verona - Medical School, Strada Le Grazie 8, 37134, Verona, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2021 Jul 2;11(1):13761. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-93335-0.
Recent findings suggest that attentional and oculomotor control is heavily affected by past experience, giving rise to selection and suppression history effects, so that target selection is facilitated if they appear at frequently attended locations, and distractor filtering is facilitated at frequently ignored locations. While selection history effects once instantiated seem to be long-lasting, whether suppression history is similarly durable is still debated. We assessed the permanence of these effects in a unique experimental setting investigating eye-movements, where the locations associated with statistical unbalances were exclusively linked with either target selection or distractor suppression. Experiment 1 and 2 explored the survival of suppression history in the long and in the short term, respectively, revealing that its lingering traces are relatively short lived. Experiment 3 showed that in the very same experimental context, selection history effects were long lasting. These results seem to suggest that different mechanisms support the learning-induced plasticity triggered by selection and suppression history. Specifically, while selection history may depend on lasting changes within stored representations of the visual space, suppression history effects hinge instead on a functional plasticity which is transient in nature, and involves spatial representations which are constantly updated and adaptively sustain ongoing oculomotor control.
最近的研究结果表明，注意力和眼球运动控制受到过去经验的强烈影响，从而产生选择和抑制历史效应，使得目标选择在经常被注意的位置得到促进，而在经常被忽略的位置则更容易过滤干扰物。虽然选择历史效应一旦形成似乎是持久的，但抑制历史是否同样持久仍存在争议。我们在一个独特的实验环境中评估了这些效应的持久性，该实验环境专门研究眼球运动，其中与统计不平衡相关的位置仅与目标选择或干扰物抑制有关。实验 1 和 2 分别研究了长时和短时内抑制历史的持久性，结果表明其残留痕迹的持续时间相对较短。实验 3 表明，在完全相同的实验环境中，选择历史效应具有持久性。这些结果似乎表明，不同的机制支持由选择和抑制历史引起的学习诱导的可塑性。具体来说，虽然选择历史可能取决于视觉空间存储表示中的持久变化，但抑制历史效应取决于一种本质上是短暂的功能可塑性，它涉及不断更新和自适应地维持持续眼球运动控制的空间表示。
