Task-Irrelevant Context Learned Under Rapid Display Presentation: Selective Attention in Associative Blocking

Frontiers in Psychology

Xuelian Zang¹  Xiaowei Xie¹  Jiao Wu¹  Leonardo Assumpção²  Artyom Zinchenko² 

[1] Center for Cognition and Brain Disorders, Affiliated Hospital of Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China;Institute of Psychological Sciences, College of Education, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China;Department Psychologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany;

关键词: contextual cueing;    rapid presentation;    contextual learning;    attention;    associative blocking;    task-irrelevant context;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2021.675848

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

In the contextual cueing task, visual search is faster for targets embedded in invariant displays compared to targets found in variant displays. However, it has been repeatedly shown that participants do not learn repeated contexts when these are irrelevant to the task. One potential explanation lays in the idea of associative blocking, where salient cues (task-relevant old items) block the learning of invariant associations in the task-irrelevant subset of items. An alternative explanation is that the associative blocking rather hinders the allocation of attention to task-irrelevant subsets, but not the learning per se. The current work examined these two explanations. In two experiments, participants performed a visual search task under a rapid presentation condition (300 ms) in Experiment 1, or under a longer presentation condition (2,500 ms) in Experiment 2. In both experiments, the search items within both old and new displays were presented in two colors which defined the irrelevant and task-relevant items within each display. The participants were asked to search for the target in the relevant subset in the learning phase. In the transfer phase, the instructions were reversed and task-irrelevant items became task-relevant (and vice versa). In line with previous studies, the search of task-irrelevant subsets resulted in no cueing effect post-transfer in the longer presentation condition; however, a reliable cueing effect was generated by task-irrelevant subsets learned under the rapid presentation. These results demonstrate that under rapid display presentation, global attentional selection leads to global context learning. However, under a longer display presentation, global attention is blocked, leading to the exclusive learning of invariant relevant items in the learning session.

【 授权许可】

CC BY