An object may afford a number of different actions. In this article, we show that an attentional mechanism inhibits competing motor programs that could elicit erroneous actions. Participants made a speeded key press to categorize the second of two successively presented door handles that were rotated at varying orientations relative to one another. Their responding hand was compatible or incompatible with the graspable part of the door handles (rightward or leftward facing). Compatible responses were faster than incompatible responses if the two handles shared an identical orientation, but they were slower if the two handles were aligned at slightly dissimilar orientations. Such suppressive surround effects are hallmarks of attentional processing in the visual domain, but they have never been observed behaviorally in the motor domain. This finding delineates a common mechanism involved in two of the most important functions of the brain: processing sensory data and preparing actions based on that information.
A representation for observing local image content is proposed for the purpose of considering the distinguishing characteristics of visual content that tends to draw a human observers gaze. Within this representation, the spectral profile distinguishing fixated from non-fixated locations is considered. Finally, the possibility of designing saliency operators based on the proposed local magnitude spectrum representation is explored, revealing a promising domain for predicting human gaze patterns.
Loach and Marí-Beffa (Vis Cogn, 10:513-526, 2003) observed that a distractor stimulus, presented immediately after a behaviorally relevant target stimulus, negatively primed a related probe stimulus indicating that the distractor had been inhibited. They argued that "post-target inhibition" may be a mechanism for preventing interference from temporally proximal stimuli; interference that could potentially result in a binding/intrusion error. In order to test this hypothesis, the authors carried out two rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) experiments in which participants had to report either the identity (Experiment 1) or color (Experiment 2) of a target letter surrounded by distractor letters. In Experiment 1, a close relationship between priming and errors was observed. When a distractor stimulus showed evidence of being inhibited the participant was less likely to commit a binding error. The opposite was true when a distractor stimulus showed evidence of being facilitated. The results of Experiment 2 showed limited evidence of the same relationship.
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