Kim Cheol Hwan, Han Suk Won
Department of Psychology, Chungnam National University, Daejeon 34134, Republic of Korea.
Behav Sci (Basel). 2023 Jun 12;13(6):495. doi: 10.3390/bs13060495.
When multiple stimuli are simultaneously presented, they compete against each other to be represented in the capacity-limited visual system. This competition increases as stimulus heterogeneity increases. Given that selective attention is a way to resolve this competition, it has been known that the effect of attention on task performance is magnified as the level of competition increases due to increased stimulus heterogeneity. While previous studies showed that stimulus heterogeneity in a task-irrelevant dimension affects task performance, it remains unknown how this kind of stimulus heterogeneity interacts with visual attention and stimulus-driven competition. Here, we found that the process of searching for a target stimulus among non-targets became inefficient as stimulus heterogeneity in a task-irrelevant dimension increased. The results also showed that the magnitude of the attentional cuing effect could be affected by increased heterogeneity. However, this modulation was dependent on the type of varied feature or task demand. We suggest that increased stimulus heterogeneity in a task-irrelevant dimension would increase stimulus-driven competition, which impoverishes the quality of stimulus representations.
当多个刺激同时呈现时，它们会相互竞争，以便在容量有限的视觉系统中得到表征。随着刺激异质性的增加，这种竞争也会加剧。鉴于选择性注意是解决这种竞争的一种方式，人们已经知道，由于刺激异质性增加导致竞争水平提高，注意对任务表现的影响会被放大。虽然先前的研究表明，任务无关维度中的刺激异质性会影响任务表现，但这种刺激异质性如何与视觉注意和刺激驱动的竞争相互作用仍不清楚。在这里，我们发现，随着任务无关维度中刺激异质性的增加，在非目标中搜索目标刺激的过程变得效率低下。结果还表明，注意提示效应的大小可能会受到异质性增加的影响。然而，这种调节取决于变化特征的类型或任务需求。我们认为，任务无关维度中刺激异质性的增加会加剧刺激驱动的竞争，从而降低刺激表征的质量。
