Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX, UK.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2022 Oct;29(5):1879-1889. doi: 10.3758/s13423-022-02116-x. Epub 2022 May 17.
Selective attention gates access to conscious awareness, resulting in surprising failures to notice clearly visible but unattended objects ('inattentional blindness'). Here, we demonstrate that expectations can have a similar effect, even for fully attended objects ('expectation-based blindness'). In three experiments, participants (N = 613) were presented with rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) streams at fixation and had to identify a target object indicated by a cue. Target category was repeated for the first 19 trials but unexpectedly changed on trial 20. The probability of correct target reports on this surprise trial was substantially lower than on preceding and subsequent trials. This impairment was present for switches between target letters and digits, and also for changes between human and animal face images. In contrast, no drop in accuracy was observed for novel target objects from the same category as previous targets. These results demonstrate that predictions about object categories affect visual awareness. Objects that are task relevant and focally attended often fail to get noticed when their category changes unexpectedly.
选择性注意控制着意识知觉的通达，导致人们对明显可见但未被注意的物体（“疏忽性盲视”）视而不见。在这里，我们证明了期望也会产生类似的效果，即使是对于完全被注意的物体（“基于期望的盲视”）也是如此。在三个实验中，参与者（N=613）在注视点接受快速序列视觉呈现（RSVP）流，并被要求识别由线索指示的目标对象。在最初的 19 次试验中，目标类别是重复的，但在第 20 次试验中出乎意料地发生了变化。在这个意外试验中，正确报告目标的概率明显低于之前和之后的试验。这种损害既存在于目标字母和数字之间的转换，也存在于人类和动物面部图像之间的转换。相比之下，当新目标物体与之前的目标属于同一类别时，准确性并没有下降。这些结果表明，关于物体类别的预测会影响视觉意识。当物体的类别出乎意料地发生变化时，即使是那些与任务相关且被聚焦注意的物体，也常常会被忽视。
