Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2024 Aug;86(6):1938-1962. doi: 10.3758/s13414-024-02921-7. Epub 2024 Jul 9.
Conventional visual search tasks do not address attention directly and their core manipulation of 'set size' - the number of displayed items - introduces stimulus confounds that hinder interpretation. However, alternative approaches have not been widely adopted, perhaps reflecting their complexity, assumptions, or indirect attention-sampling. Here, a new procedure, the ATtention Location And Size ('ATLAS') task used probe displays to track attention's location, breadth, and guidance during search. Though most probe displays comprised six items, participants reported only the single item they judged themselves to have perceived most clearly - indexing the attention 'peak'. By sampling peaks across variable 'choice sets', the size and position of the attention window during search was profiled. These indices appeared to distinguish narrow- from broad attention, signalled attention to pairs of items where it arose and tracked evolving attention-guidance over time. ATLAS is designed to discriminate five key search modes: serial-unguided, sequential-guided, unguided attention to 'clumps' with local guidance, and broad parallel-attention with or without guidance. This initial investigation used only an example set of highly regular stimuli, but its broader potential should be investigated.
传统的视觉搜索任务并没有直接关注注意力，它们对“集大小”的核心操作——显示项目的数量——引入了刺激混淆，这阻碍了对注意力的解释。然而，替代方法并没有被广泛采用，这可能反映了它们的复杂性、假设或间接的注意力抽样。在这里，一种新的程序，即注意力定位和大小（“ATLAS”）任务，使用探针显示来跟踪搜索过程中的注意力位置、广度和引导。尽管大多数探针显示由六个项目组成，但参与者只报告了他们自己判断最清楚的单个项目——索引注意力“峰值”。通过在可变的“选择集”中采样峰值，可以描绘搜索过程中注意力窗口的大小和位置。这些指标似乎可以区分窄注意力和宽注意力，表明注意力出现在一对项目上，并随着时间的推移跟踪注意力引导的变化。ATLAS 旨在区分五种关键的搜索模式：串行无引导、顺序引导、无引导对“簇”的注意力和有或无引导的广泛并行注意力。这项初步研究仅使用了一组高度规则的示例刺激，但应该研究其更广泛的潜力。
