Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Education, Université de Genève, Genève, Switzerland.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2466-5221.
J Vis. 2024 Sep 3;24(9):4. doi: 10.1167/jov.24.9.4.
When target and distractor stimuli are close together, they activate the same neurons and there is ambiguity as to what the neural activity represents. It has been suggested that the ambiguity is resolved by spatial competition between target and nontarget stimuli. A competitive advantage is conveyed by bottom-up biases (e.g., stimulus saliency) and top-down biases (e.g., the match to a stored representation of the target stimulus). Here, we tested the hypothesis that regions with high perceptual performance may provide a bottom-up bias, resulting in increased distractor interference. Initially, we focused on two known anisotropies. At equal distance from central fixation, perceptual performance is better along the horizontal than the vertical meridian, and in the lower than in the upper visual hemifield. Consistently, interference from distractors on the horizontal meridian was greater than interference from distractors on the vertical meridian. However, distractors in the lower hemifield interfered less than distractors in the upper visual hemifield, which is contrary to the known anisotropy. These results were obtained with targets and distractors on opposite meridians. Further, we observed greater interference from distractors on the meridians compared with distractors on the diagonals, possibly reflecting anisotropies in attentional scanning. Overall, the results are only partially consistent with the hypothesis that distractor interference is larger for distractors on regions with high perceptual performance.
当目标和干扰刺激物靠得很近时，它们会激活相同的神经元，并且对于神经活动代表什么存在歧义。有人认为，通过目标和非目标刺激之间的空间竞争可以解决这种歧义。竞争优势是通过自上而下的偏见（例如，刺激显著性）和自下而上的偏见（例如，与目标刺激的存储表示匹配）来传递的。在这里，我们测试了这样一个假设，即具有高感知性能的区域可能提供自下而上的偏见，从而导致干扰增加。最初，我们关注了两个已知的各向异性。在离中央注视点相等的距离处，水平方向上的感知性能优于垂直方向，下半视野的感知性能优于上半视野。一致的是，水平子午线的干扰比垂直子午线的干扰大。然而，下半视野的干扰比上半视野的干扰小，这与已知的各向异性相反。这些结果是在用目标和干扰物在相对子午线获得的。此外，我们观察到与对角线相比，子午线的干扰更大，这可能反映了注意力扫描的各向异性。总的来说，结果仅部分符合这样一种假设，即对于具有高感知性能的区域中的干扰物，干扰更大。
