Detect, Reject, Focus: The Role of Satiation and Odor Relevance in Cross-Modal Attention
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Detect, Reject, Focus: The Role of Satiation and Odor Relevance in Cross-Modal Attention Timothy Schreiber & Theresa L. White
Received: 11 June 2013 / Accepted: 6 October 2013 / Published online: 27 October 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract Visual task performance has been shown to be affected differentially based on exogenous attentional demands from trigeminal odorants (Michael et al. Behav Neurosci 119:708–715, 2005). To test the exogenous influences of other biologically relevant characteristics of odorants, hungry and satiated undergraduates completed a visual search task in the presence of an odor (popcorn, jasmine, or unscented). Results showed that popcorn seemed more intense to hungry participants than those who were satiated. Reaction time results generally followed the pattern of most visual search research; significant effects were observed for feature complexity, distracter field size, and the interaction between complexity and distracter field size (Forster and Lavie J Exp Psychol 14:73–83, 2008; Itti and Koch Vision Res 40:1489–1506, 2000; Kumada Vision Res 50:1402–1413, 2010; Treisman and Gelade Cogn Psychol 12:97–136, 1980). However, olfactory group and hunger level also influenced reaction times, in that satiated participants were faster in low perceptual load (single shared feature, small set-size) conditions than hungry participants. Results suggest that olfactory attention is in a constant state of environmental monitoring for salient odors that uses resources from a shared pool. Fewer resources seem to be used when an odor with decreased saliency is detected, resulting in attentional benefits for information coming in from the visual system. These results generally support the modified Perceptual Load Theory of cross-modal attention (Tellinghuisen and Nowak Percept Psychophys 65:8717–8728, 2003) in which available shared attentional resources can be used to inhibit distracters to a visual task from other sensory modalities.
T. Schreiber : T. L. White (*) Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Keywords Attention . Cross-modal . Hunger . Olfactory . Satiety . Visual
The sense of smell plays an integral, though often unnoticed, role in everyday life. Humans scan the olfactory environment (Engen et al. 1991) to detect threats, such as fire, spoiled foods, or dangerous fumes, and to find attractive substances, such as food, flowers, or the scent of loved ones (Stevenson 2010). This environmental olfactory monitoring continues, even when people are engaged in other tasks (Stevenson et al. 2011) using other sensory systems. At any given moment, an individual encounters more perceptual information than can be effectively processed at once; visual, olfactory, auditory, tactile, and gustatory information can all arrive simultaneously, creating the need to attend to only the most important information (Pashler et al. 2001). In everyday life, all of the stimuli that can be perceived in a situation compete for attention, and the goal of attention is t
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