Department of Psychology, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA.
Departments of Ophthalmology, Neurology, and Physiology & Pharmacology, SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, Brooklyn, NY, USA.
Vision Res. 2022 Jul;196:108030. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2022.108030. Epub 2022 Mar 18.
Prior target knowledge (i.e., positive cues) improves visual search performance. However, there is considerable debate about whether distractor knowledge (i.e., negative cues) can guide search. Some studies suggest the active suppression of negatively cued search items, while others suggest the initial capture of attention by negatively cued items. Prior work has used pictorial or specific text cues but has not explicitly compared them. We build on that work by comparing positive and negative cues presented pictorially and as categorical text labels using photorealistic objects and eye movement measures. Search displays contained a target (cued on positive trials), a lure from the target category (cued on negative trials), and four categorically-unrelated distractors. Search performance with positive cues resulted in stronger attentional guidance and faster object recognition for pictorial relative to categorical cues (i.e., a pictorial advantage, suggesting specific visual details afforded by pictorial cues improved search). However, in most search performance metrics, negative cues mitigate the pictorial advantage. Given that the negatively cued items captured attention, generated target guidance but mitigated the pictorial advantage, these results are partly consistent with both existing theories. Specific visual details provided in positive cues produce a large pictorial advantage in all measures, whereas specific visual details in negative cues only produce a small pictorial advantage for object recognition but not for attentional guidance. This asymmetry in the pictorial advantage suggests that the down-weighting of specific negatively cued visual features is less efficient than the up-weighting of specific positively cued visual features.
先前的目标知识（即正提示）会提高视觉搜索表现。然而，关于负提示（即负提示）是否能引导搜索存在很大争议。一些研究表明可以主动抑制负提示的搜索项，而另一些研究则表明负提示项会初始捕获注意力。之前的研究使用了图片或特定的文本提示，但没有明确进行比较。我们通过比较使用逼真物体和眼动测量的图片和分类文本标签呈现的正、负提示，对该工作进行了扩展。搜索显示包含目标（在正提示试验中提示）、目标类别中的诱饵（在负提示试验中提示）以及四个分类无关的分心物。与分类提示相比，正提示的搜索表现会产生更强的注意力引导和更快的物体识别（即存在图片优势，表明图片提示提供的特定视觉细节可以改善搜索）。然而，在大多数搜索性能指标中，负提示会减轻图片优势。由于负提示的项目吸引了注意力，产生了目标引导，但减轻了图片优势，因此这些结果在一定程度上与现有的两种理论都一致。正提示中提供的特定视觉细节在所有测量中都会产生很大的图片优势，而负提示中的特定视觉细节仅对物体识别产生较小的图片优势，而对注意力引导则没有。这种图片优势的不对称性表明，负提示的特定视觉特征的权重降低不如正提示的特定视觉特征的权重提高有效。
