Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2022 Aug;29(4):1338-1346. doi: 10.3758/s13423-022-02071-7. Epub 2022 Mar 22.
Visual search benefits from advance knowledge of nontarget features. However, it is unknown whether these negatively cued features are suppressed in advance (proactively) or during search (reactively). To test this, we presented color cues varying from trial-to-trial that predicted target or nontarget colors. Experiment 1 (N = 96) showed that both target and nontarget cues speeded search. To test whether attention proactively modified cued feature representations, in Experiment 2 (N = 200), we interleaved color probe and search trials and had participants detect the color of a briefly presented ring that could either match the cued color or not. People detected positively cued colors better than other colors, whereas negatively cued colors were detected no better or worse than other colors. These results demonstrate that nontarget features are not suppressed proactively, and instead suggest that anticipated nontarget features are ignored via reactive mechanisms.
视觉搜索得益于对非目标特征的预先了解。然而，目前尚不清楚这些负面提示特征是预先（主动地）还是在搜索过程中（被动地）被抑制。为了检验这一点，我们在试验间呈现了各种颜色提示，这些提示预测了目标或非目标的颜色。实验 1（N = 96）表明，目标和非目标提示都能加速搜索。为了检验注意力是否主动地修改了提示特征的表示，在实验 2（N = 200）中，我们交错呈现颜色探针和搜索试验，并要求参与者检测一个短暂呈现的圆环的颜色，该圆环的颜色可以与提示的颜色匹配，也可以不匹配。人们对正提示的颜色的检测要好于其他颜色，而对负提示的颜色的检测并不比其他颜色好或差。这些结果表明，非目标特征不会被主动抑制，而是表明预期的非目标特征是通过被动机制被忽略的。
