Simple action planning can affect attentional allocation in subsequent visual search
- PDF / 741,225 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 117 Downloads / 199 Views
BRIEF REPORT
Simple action planning can affect attentional allocation in subsequent visual search Seohee Han 1 & Eunhee Ji 1 & Eunhye Choe 1 & Dogyun Kim 1 & Min-Shik Kim 1
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Previous research has shown that mental representations of actions can influence performance on relevant tasks or dimensions even when there is no overt execution of the action. In this study, we examined whether cognitive processes prior to the physical execution of an action can elicit attentional bias towards irrelevant tasks or dimensions of that action. Participants performed two independent tasks—an action task and a search task—where they were instructed to plan an action and execute the action following the visual search task. We found that the same features of the object were prioritized in the subsequent search task when participants had planned an action response on the object in comparison to when they had not. This effect occurred even when the feature was irrelevant to the tasks or required action. Furthermore, the effect of action planning without physical response was found to be comparable to the effect of physical response. These results suggest that planning of a simple action can induce attentional bias to irrelevant features of objects even without physical action. Keywords Attention . Visual search . Action planning . Action effect
In our daily lives, we interact with many of the objects we see. Interaction with objects can be as simple as pressing a button on a remote control, or as complex as driving a car. To execute such interactions successfully, we often coordinate our physical movements with visual attention; often, our visual perception guides physical action. Many studies have previously shown that actions or action requirements can have an impact on people’s cognitive processes, including visual perception (e.g., Neumann & Prinz, 1990; Schütz-Bosbach & Prinz, 2007) and memory (Hanning & Deubel, 2018; Heuer, Crawford, & Schubö, 2017; Ohl & Rolfs, 2017). A recent series of studies found that simple arbitrary action towards an object can induce the processing of features of an acted-on object to be prioritized in a following, unrelated task, and this phenomenon was named “action effect” (Buttaccio & Hahn, 2011; Suh & Abrams, 2018; Wang, Sun, Sun, Weidler, & Abrams, 2017; Weidler & Abrams, 2014, 2016, 2018). Since the term “action effect” can refer to a broad range of effects that actions have in different areas in psychology, the * Min-Shik Kim [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Yonsei University, 50, Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, Korea
“action effect” discussed here will be limited to the following findings only. In Buttaccio and Hahn’s (2011) study, participants first saw a word cue (e.g., a colour or shape name) followed by a coloured stimulus (prime). For the action task, they were instructed to respond to the prime by pressing the space bar if the word and the feature of the prime matched (action), and not to respond if they did not match (no actio
Data Loading...
