Probing early attention following negative and positive templates
- PDF / 514,836 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 83 Downloads / 202 Views
Probing early attention following negative and positive templates Ziyao Zhang 1 & Nicholas Gapelin 2 & Nancy B. Carlisle 1
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2019
Abstract In visual search tasks, cues indicating the upcoming distractor color can benefit search performance compared with uninformative cues. However, benefits from these negative cues are consistently smaller than benefits from positive cues (cuing target color), even when both cues are equally informative. This suggests that using a negative template is less effective than using a positive template. Here, we contrast the early attentional effects of negative and positive templates using the letter probe technique. On most trials, participants searched for a shape-defined target after receiving a positive, negative, or neutral color cue. On occasional probe trials, letters briefly appeared on the search items, and participants reported as many letters as possible. Examining the proportion of letters reported on potential targets versus distractors provided a snapshot of attentional allocation at the time of the probe. Across probes at 100, 250, and 400 ms, participants recalled more letters on target-colored objects than letters on distractor-colored objects following both negative and positive cues. These cuing benefits on probe report trials were larger at later probe times than early probe times, indicating both types of cues became more effective across time. Importantly, negative cue probe benefits were consistently smaller than positive cue benefits. Finally, following an extremely short probe (25 ms), we found no RT benefit following negative cues as well as no evidence that negatively cued items capture attention. These results help explain the previously reported differences in RT benefit following positive and negative cues, and support the idea of early active attentional suppression. Keywords Cognitive and attentional control . Visual search . Working memory
Traditionally, research on visual search has emphasized enhancement of search items from an internal representation of a search goal, the target template. That is, search items that match the known features of the upcoming target tend to be prioritized during visual search (Egeth, Virzi, & Garbart, 1984; Wolfe, 1994). For example, if you are searching a shelf for a red book, you might constrain visual search to only red objects. However, there is now growing evidence that foreknowledge of distractor features also aids in visual search (Arita, Carlisle, & Woodman, 2012; Carlisle & Nitka, 2019; Cunningham & Egeth, 2016; Reeder, Olivers, & Pollmann, 2017). For example, Arita et al. (2012) designed a series of search experiments in which participants searched displays of Landolt Cs for a target of a specific orientation. Importantly, each search display was preceded by a cue that could be * Nancy B. Carlisle [email protected] 1
Chandler-Ullman Hall, Department of Psychology, Lehigh University, 17 Memorial Drive East, Bethlehem, PA 18015, USA
2
Department of Psychology, Binghamton
Data Loading...
