Chak Carly, Machniak Emily, Giesbrecht Barry
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106-9660, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2025 May 13. doi: 10.3758/s13414-025-03078-7.
Physically salient stimuli are potent influences on behavior, but their negative impacts can be reduced in the presence of explicit goal-related cues. Here, we investigated whether goal-related cues associated with value are capable of insulating information from task-irrelevant abrupt onsets during two stages of information processing. Abrupt onsets were shown either after attention-directing cues and before a target (Experiment 1) or after a target that is to be remembered for later report (Experiment 2). The cues indicated the value associated with upcoming target locations, and they were either different in value, indicating that one was more valuable than the other, or equal in value. In both experiments, subjects were instructed to report the target that would earn them the most points (Experiment 1) or money (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, performance suffered with equal cues, suggesting that orienting to multiple locations increases susceptibility to distraction from physically salient stimuli. In Experiment 2, the same pattern did not appear for abrupt onsets during the retention period; instead, the impact of the physically salient stimulus was dependent upon working memory capacity. The differential impact of abrupt onsets prior to (Experiment 1) and after (Experiment 2) encoding of value-related target locations suggest that physically salient task-irrelevant stimuli influence value-related information processing differently during orienting and maintenance.
物理上显著的刺激对行为有强大的影响，但在存在明确的目标相关线索时，它们的负面影响可以减少。在这里，我们研究了与价值相关的目标线索是否能够在信息处理的两个阶段将信息与任务无关的突然出现隔离开来。突然出现的刺激要么在引导注意力的线索之后、目标之前呈现（实验1），要么在需要记住以供后续报告的目标之后呈现（实验2）。这些线索表明了与即将出现的目标位置相关的价值，它们要么价值不同，表明一个比另一个更有价值，要么价值相等。在两个实验中，受试者都被指示报告能为他们赢得最多分数（实验1）或金钱（实验2）的目标。在实验1中，当线索价值相等时，表现会受到影响，这表明定向到多个位置会增加对物理上显著刺激的干扰的易感性。在实验2中，在保留期内突然出现的刺激没有出现相同的模式；相反，物理上显著刺激的影响取决于工作记忆容量。在对与价值相关的目标位置进行编码之前（实验1）和之后（实验2）突然出现的刺激的不同影响表明，物理上显著的任务无关刺激在定向和维持过程中对价值相关信息处理的影响不同。
