Top-down versus bottom-up attentional control: a failed theoretical dichotomy

Smith

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

et al. 2016

. (2015) 'Altering attentional control settings causes persistent biases of visual attention.', The quarterly journal of experimental psychology., 69 (1). pp. 129-149.Further information on publisher's website:https://doi.org/10. 1080/17470218.2015.1031144 Publisher's copyright statement:This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor Francis in the quarterly journal of experimental psychology. on 13/05/2015 available online:http://www.tandfonline.com/10. 1080/17470218.2015.1031144 Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. arbitrary stimulus in healthy participants. Subjects were biased towards the colour green by an information sheet. Attentional bias was assessed using a change detection task. After an interval of either 1 or 2 weeks participants were then either re-tested on the same change detection task, tested on a different change detection task where colour was irrelevant, or were biased towards an alternative colour. One experiment included trials in which the distracter stimuli (but never the target stimuli) were green. The key finding was that green stimuli in the second task attracted attention, despite this impairing task performance. Furthermore, inducing a second attentional bias did not override the initial bias toward green objects. The attentional bias also persisted for at least two weeks. It is argued that this persistent attentional bias is mediated by a chronic change to participants attentional control settings, which is aided by long-term representations involving contextual cuing. We speculate that similar changes to attentional control settings and continuous cuing may relate to attentional biases observed in psychopathologies. Targeting these biases may be a productive approach to treatment.Attentional Bias Development Although there has been great debate on how visual stimuli are selected for further processing (Theeuwes, 1991;1992;Belopolsky & Theeuwes, 2010;Folk et al., 1992;Bacon & Egeth, 1994), one generally accepted proposal is that observers can activate one of two distinctive attentional sets:Attentional Bias Development 5Singleton Detection Mode or Feature Search Mode (Bacon & Egeth, 1994; Leber & Egeth, 2006b).Singleton Detection Mode is based purely on the physical salience of an item, allowing the most salient item in a visual field -such as a feature singleton (a red item amongst greyscale items) -to capture attention. Alternatively, Feature Search Mode relies on a defining target feature -such as a particular colour -and is a much narrower attentional se...

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Altering attentional control settings causes persistent biases of visual attention

Smith

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

et al. 2016

Atten Percept Psychophys

“…Intertrial priming has been found for various stimulus dimensions such as color, spatial frequency, orientation, and shape (Kristjánsson & Campana, 2010). Since intertrial priming occurred in search tasks that controlled for physical salience, and also ocurred when observers were informed about the target feature in the upcoming trial (Becker, 2008;Folk & Remington, 2008;Maljkovic & Nakayama, 1994), it was argued that intertrial priming is independent of bottom-up and top-down processing (Wang, Kristjánsson, & Nakayama, 2005) and may be a good example for a third factor, Bselection history^ (Awh, Belopolsky, & Theeuwes, 2012;.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Intertrial priming due to distractor repetition is eliminated in homogeneous contexts

Feldmann-Wüstefeld

Schubö

2016

Targets are found more easily in a visual search task when their feature is repeatedly presented, an effect known as intertrial priming. Recent findings suggest that priming of distractors can also improve search performance by facilitated suppression of repeated distractor features. The efficacy of intertrial priming for targets can be potentiated by the expectancy of a specific target feature; systematic repetition shows larger intertrial priming than random repetition. For distractors, the underlying mechanism is less clear. We used the systematic lateralization approach to disentangle target-and distractorrelated processing with subcomponents of the N2pc. We found no modulation of the N T component, which reflects prioritization of target processing. The N D component, which reflects attentional capture by irrelevant stimuli, however, showed intertrial priming: N D monotonically decreased with repetition of a distractor color, but only if a specific distractor feature was expected, and if the context induced a search that was vulnerable to attentional capture. These observations suggest that distractor priming only improves visual search if volitional control is relatively high. The results also suggest that intertrial priming for distractors is due to decreased attentional capture by repeatedly presented distractors, whereas target processing remains unaffected. To cope with the vast amount of incoming information, the visual system selects stimuli based not only on intentions of the observer and physical salience but also on recent selection history. For example, RTs for targets decrease when a target feature is identical to a preceding trial. This intertrial priming effect was originally found for pop-out targets that are defined by a unique feature that clearly separates them from all visual background and termed Keywords

Atten Percept Psychophys

“…To use the more recent conception of Awh, Belopolsky, and Theeuwes (2012), the configuration of search displays may contribute to a participant's Bpriority map,^setting up expectations which are combined with factors associated with physical salience and only together determine attentional priority. Interpretations such as these, necessary in the light of the current results, suggest that attentional capture does not arise merely as the result of local transients or the local appearance of objects, but instead emerges from a map of priorities and expectations informed from many sources.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do sudden onsets need to be perceived as new objects to capture attention? The interplay between sensory transients and display configuration

Owens

Špehar

2016

Yantis and Jonides (1984) and Jonides and Yantis (1988) reported robust involuntary attentional capture by sudden-onsets, the origin of which has been debated. Prominent accounts have highlighted aspects that include the Bnew object^status of a sudden-onset (Yantis & Hillstrom, 1994) and the substantial luminance changes accompanying their appearance (Gellatly, Cole & Blurton, 1999;Franconeri, Hollingworth & Simons, 2005), including relative differences in the amount of sensory change between target and nontarget items (Pinto, Olivers & Theeuwes, 2008). In this research we dissociate the amount of sensory change accompanying sudden onsets from the extent to which they appear as newly created objects in search displays. We attempted to determine the relative contribution of local sensory changes and display configuration to attentional capture by sudden-onsets. We showed that the display configuration of old objects modulates the impact of capture caused by sudden-onsets.