Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
Sci Rep. 2024 Feb 26;14(1):4624. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-55399-6.
Temporal attention is voluntarily deployed at specific moments, whereas temporal expectation is deployed according to timing probabilities. When the target appears at an expected moment in a sequence, temporal attention improves performance at the attended moments, but the timing and the precision of the attentional window remain unknown. Here we independently and concurrently manipulated temporal attention-via behavioral relevance-and temporal expectation-via session-wise precision and trial-wise hazard rate-to investigate whether and how these mechanisms interact to improve perception. Our results reveal that temporal attention interacts with temporal expectation-the higher the precision, the stronger the attention benefit, but surprisingly this benefit decreased with delayed onset despite the increasing probability of stimulus appearance. When attention was suboptimally deployed to earlier than expected moments, it could not be reoriented to a later time point. These findings provide evidence that temporal attention and temporal expectation are different mechanisms, and highlight their interplay in optimizing visual performance.
时间注意是在特定时刻自愿分配的，而时间预期则根据时间概率进行分配。当目标在序列中的预期时刻出现时，时间注意会提高注意力时刻的表现，但注意力窗口的时间和精度仍然未知。在这里，我们通过行为相关性独立且同时操纵时间注意，通过会话精度和试验风险率来操纵时间预期，以研究这些机制是否以及如何相互作用以改善感知。我们的结果表明，时间注意与时间预期相互作用——精度越高，注意力的好处就越大，但令人惊讶的是，尽管出现刺激的概率增加，但这种好处会随着延迟而减少。当注意力被不适当地分配到早于预期的时刻时，它就不能重新定向到稍后的时间点。这些发现提供了证据表明，时间注意和时间预期是不同的机制，并强调了它们在优化视觉表现中的相互作用。
