Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London.
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2023 Jul;152(7):1951-1966. doi: 10.1037/xge0001360. Epub 2023 Mar 20.
Having an internal model of one's attention can be useful for effectively managing limited perceptual and cognitive resources. While previous work has hinted at the existence of an internal model of attention, it is still unknown how rich and flexible this model is, whether it corresponds to one's own attention or to a generic person-invariant schema, and whether it is specified as a list of facts and rules or alternatively as a probabilistic simulation model. To this end, we tested participants' ability to estimate their own behavior in a visual search task with novel displays. In six online experiments (four pre-registered), prospective search time estimates reflected accurate metacognitive knowledge of key findings in the visual search literature, including the set-size effect, higher efficiency of color over conjunction search, and the asymmetric contributions of target and distractor identities to search difficulty. In contrast, estimates were biased to assume serial search, and demonstrated little to no insight into sizeable effects of search asymmetries for basic visual features, and of target-distractor similarity. Together, our findings reveal a complex picture, where internal models of visual search are sensitive to some, but not all, of the factors that make some searches more difficult than others. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
拥有对自身注意力的内部模型对于有效管理有限的感知和认知资源可能是有用的。虽然之前的工作已经暗示了注意力的内部模型的存在，但仍不清楚这个模型有多么丰富和灵活，它是对应于自身的注意力还是对应于通用的、不变的个体模式，以及它是具体化为一系列事实和规则，还是替代地作为概率模拟模型。为此，我们测试了参与者在具有新显示的视觉搜索任务中估计自己行为的能力。在六项在线实验（四项预先注册）中，前瞻性搜索时间估计反映了对视觉搜索文献中关键发现的准确元认知知识，包括集大小效应、颜色搜索比合取搜索效率更高，以及目标和干扰物身份对搜索难度的不对称贡献。相比之下，这些估计存在偏差，倾向于假设序列搜索，并且对基本视觉特征的搜索不对称性以及目标-干扰物相似性的显著影响几乎没有洞察力。总的来说，我们的研究结果揭示了一个复杂的情况，即视觉搜索的内部模型对某些但不是所有导致某些搜索比其他搜索更困难的因素敏感。
