Duncan J, Ward R, Shapiro K
MRC Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge, UK.
Nature. 1994 May 26;369(6478):313-5. doi: 10.1038/369313a0.
In vision, attentional limitations are reflected in interference or reduced accuracy when two objects must be identified at once in a brief display. In our experiments a brief temporal separation was introduced between the two objects to be identified. We measured how long the object continued to interfere with the second, and hence the time course of the first object's attentional demand. According to conventional serial models, attention is assigned rapidly to one object after another, with a dwell time of only a few dozen milliseconds per item. But we report here that interference lasts for several hundred milliseconds--an order of magnitude more than the prediction of conventional models. We suggest that visual attention is not a high-speed switching mechanism, but a sustained state during which relevant objects become available to influence behaviour. This conclusion is consistent with recent physiological results in the monkey.
在视觉方面，当在一个简短展示中必须同时识别两个物体时，注意力限制会反映在干扰或准确性降低上。在我们的实验中，在要识别的两个物体之间引入了短暂的时间间隔。我们测量了第一个物体对第二个物体的干扰持续多长时间，从而得出第一个物体注意力需求的时间进程。根据传统的串行模型，注意力会迅速依次分配到一个物体上，每个项目的停留时间只有几十毫秒。但我们在此报告，干扰会持续数百毫秒——比传统模型的预测长一个数量级。我们认为视觉注意力不是一种高速切换机制，而是一种持续状态，在此期间相关物体可用来影响行为。这一结论与最近在猴子身上得到的生理学结果一致。
