Department of Psychology, Sapienza University, Rome, Italy.
Psychol Res. 2023 Jul;87(5):1537-1548. doi: 10.1007/s00426-022-01760-1. Epub 2022 Nov 12.
Psychological research has extensively shown that individuals are limited in their ability to process environmental information temporally. In a rapid serial visual presentation, the ability to identify the second of two targets presented in close succession among distractors is usually impaired, a phenomenon known as attentional blink (AB). Paradoxically, when the second target immediately succeeds the first one (lag 1), such an ability is relatively spared, but individuals are more prone to misreport their correct temporal succession. Competitive mechanisms based on prior entry and perceptual integration processes have been suggested to account for the apparent loss of temporal information. We report findings from four experiments, showing that, once identified, categorical dimensions of the stimuli used as targets (here, the ordinality of numbers) may guide the perception and the resulting report of their temporal order. Specifically, at lag 1 individuals more frequently encode the two digits in ascending order. Such a biased regularization may represent another possible outcome of the failure in temporal segregation observed at lag 1, indicating that a mechanism based on prior entry is not generalizable in explaining order reversals. The kind of stimuli chosen as targets in AB paradigms can activate high-level categorical dimensions capable of influencing the performance on this task.
心理学研究广泛表明，个体在时间上处理环境信息的能力是有限的。在快速序列视觉呈现中，在干扰项中识别连续呈现的两个目标中的第二个的能力通常会受到损害，这种现象称为注意瞬脱（AB）。矛盾的是，当第二个目标紧随第一个目标（滞后 1）出现时，这种能力相对不受影响，但个体更容易错误报告他们正确的时间顺序。基于先前进入和感知整合过程的竞争机制被认为可以解释时间信息的明显损失。我们报告了四项实验的结果，表明一旦确定，用作目标的刺激的类别维度（这里是数字的顺序）可能会指导对其时间顺序的感知和由此产生的报告。具体来说，在滞后 1 时，个体更频繁地按升序编码两个数字。这种有偏差的正则化可能代表在滞后 1 观察到的时间分离失败的另一种可能结果，表明基于先前进入的机制不能推广用于解释顺序反转。AB 范式中选择的目标刺激类型可以激活高级类别维度，从而影响此任务的表现。
