School of Medicine and Psychology, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia.
Centre for Human Factors and Sociotechnical Systems, University of the Sunshine Coast, Maroochydore, QLD, Australia.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2024 Mar;77(3):492-510. doi: 10.1177/17470218231173883. Epub 2023 Jun 2.
Animates receive preferential attentional processing over inanimates because, from an evolutionary perspective, animates are important to human survival. We investigated whether animacy affects visual statistical learning-the detection and extraction of regularities in visual information from our rich, dynamic, and complex environment. Participants completed a selective-attention task, in which regularities were embedded in two visual streams, an attended and an unattended visual stream. The attended visual stream always consisted of line-drawings of non-objects, while the unattended visual stream consisted of line-drawings of either animates or inanimates. Participants then completed a triplet-discrimination task, which assessed their ability to extract regularities from the attended and unattended visual streams. We also assessed participants' awareness of regularities in the visual statistical learning task, and asked if any learning strategies were used. We were specifically interested in whether the animacy status of line-drawings in the unattended visual stream would affect visual statistical learning. There were four key findings. First, selective attention modulates visual statistical learning, with greater visual statistical learning for attended than for unattended information. Second, animacy does not affect visual statistical learning, with no differences found in visual statistical learning performance between the animate and inanimate condition. Third, awareness of regularities was associated with visual statistical learning of attended information. Fourth, participants used strategies (e.g., naming or labelling stimuli) during the visual statistical learning task. Further research is required to understand whether visual statistical learning is one of the adaptive functions that evolved from ancestral environments.
生物相对于非生物更容易受到优先注意，因为从进化的角度来看，生物对人类的生存很重要。我们研究了生物性是否会影响视觉统计学习，即从我们丰富、动态和复杂的环境中检测和提取视觉信息的规则。参与者完成了一个选择性注意任务，在这个任务中，规则被嵌入到两个视觉流中，一个是注意的视觉流，另一个是不注意的视觉流。注意的视觉流总是由非物体的线描组成，而不注意的视觉流则由生物或非生物的线描组成。然后，参与者完成了一个三联体辨别任务，评估他们从注意和不注意的视觉流中提取规则的能力。我们还评估了参与者在视觉统计学习任务中的规则意识，并询问是否使用了任何学习策略。我们特别感兴趣的是，不注意的视觉流中线描的生物性状态是否会影响视觉统计学习。有四个关键发现。首先，选择性注意调节视觉统计学习，与不注意的信息相比，参与者对注意的信息有更强的视觉统计学习能力。其次，生物性并不影响视觉统计学习，在有生命和无生命条件下，参与者在视觉统计学习表现上没有差异。第三，对规则的意识与对注意信息的视觉统计学习有关。第四，参与者在视觉统计学习任务中使用了策略（例如，命名或标记刺激）。需要进一步的研究来理解视觉统计学习是否是从祖先环境中进化而来的一种适应性功能。
