Temporal predictability does not impact attentional blink performance: effects of fixed vs. random inter-trial intervals

PeerJ

article

Lucienne Shenfield¹  Vanessa Beanland²  Deborah Apthorp³ 

[1] Research School of Psychology, Australian National University;Department of Psychology, University of Otago;School of Psychology, University of New England;Research School of Computer Science, Australian National University

关键词: Attention;    Attentional blink;    Psychomotor vigilance task;    PVT;    Cognition;    Task difficulty;   

DOI  :  10.7717/peerj.8677

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Inra

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundDoes the inclusion of a randomized inter-trial interval (ITI) impact performance on an Attentional Blink (AB) task? The AB phenomenon is often used as a test of transient attention (Dux & Marois, 2009); however, it is unclear whether incorporating aspects of sustained attention, by implementing a randomized ITI, would impact task performance. The current research sought to investigate this, by contrasting a standard version of the AB task with a random ITI version to determine whether performance changed, reflecting a change in difficulty, engagement, or motivation.MethodThirty university students (21 female; age range 18–57, Mage= 21.5, SD = 7.4) completed both versions of the task, in counterbalanced order.ResultsNo significant difference in performance was found between the standard AB task and the AB task with the random ITI. Bayesian analyses suggested moderate evidence for the null.ConclusionTemporal unpredictability did not appear to impact task performance. This suggests that the standard AB task has cognitive properties with regards to task difficulty, engagement, and motivation, that are inherently similar to tasks that employ a randomized ITI to measure sustained attention (e.g., the Psychomotor Vigilance Task; PVT; Dinges & Powell, 1985). This finding provides important support for future research which may seek to obtain a more detailed understanding of attention through the comparison of performance on transient and sustained attention tasks.

【 授权许可】

CC BY