Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, 1835 Neil Ave, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2024 Feb;31(1):223-233. doi: 10.3758/s13423-023-02339-6. Epub 2023 Aug 1.
We are often bombarded with salient stimuli that capture our attention and distract us from our current goals. Decades of research have shown the robust detrimental impacts of salient distractors on search performance and, of late, in leading to altered feature perception. These feature errors can be quite extreme, and thus, undesirable. In search tasks, salient distractors can be suppressed if they appear more frequently in one location, and this learned spatial suppression can lead to reductions in the cost of distraction as measured by reaction time slowing. Can learned spatial suppression also protect against visual feature errors? To investigate this question, participants were cued to report one of four briefly presented colored squares on a color wheel. On two-thirds of trials, a salient distractor appeared around one of the nontarget squares, appearing more frequently in one location over the course of the experiment. Participants' responses were fit to a model estimating performance parameters and compared across conditions. Our results showed that general performance (guessing and precision) improved when the salient distractor appeared in a likely location relative to elsewhere. Critically, feature swap errors (probability of misreporting the color at the salient distractor's location) were also significantly reduced when the distractor appeared in a likely location, suggesting that learned spatial suppression of a salient distractor helps protect the processing of target features. This study provides evidence that, in addition to helping us avoid salient distractors, suppression likely plays a larger role in helping to prevent distracting information from being encoded.
我们经常会受到显著刺激的轰炸，这些刺激会吸引我们的注意力，使我们偏离当前的目标。几十年来的研究表明，显著的干扰物对搜索性能有强大的不利影响，最近还导致了特征感知的改变。这些特征错误可能非常极端，因此是不理想的。在搜索任务中，如果显著的干扰物出现在一个位置的频率更高，就可以被抑制，这种习得的空间抑制可以导致反应时减慢所衡量的分心成本降低。习得的空间抑制也能防止视觉特征错误吗？为了研究这个问题，参与者被提示在一个颜色轮上报告四个短暂呈现的彩色方块中的一个。在三分之二的试验中，一个显著的干扰物出现在一个非目标方块的周围，在实验过程中出现在一个位置的频率更高。参与者的反应被拟合到一个估计性能参数的模型中，并在不同条件下进行比较。我们的结果表明，当显著的干扰物出现在一个可能的位置时，整体表现（猜测和精度）会提高。关键是，当干扰物出现在一个可能的位置时，特征交换错误（在显著干扰物位置报告错误颜色的概率）也显著降低，这表明对显著干扰物的习得性空间抑制有助于保护目标特征的处理。这项研究提供了证据表明，除了帮助我们避免显著的干扰物之外，抑制可能在帮助防止分心信息被编码方面发挥更大的作用。
