Attentional disengagement effect based on relevant features

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Yuxiang Hao¹  Qi Zhang¹  Zile Wang¹  Mengxuan Sun¹ 

[1] School of Educational Science, Minnan Normal University

关键词: attentional capture;    visual search;    attentional disengagement;    saccadic latency;    Eye Movements;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2022.960183

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

In visual search tasks, the distractors similar to the target can attract our attention and affect the speed of attentional disengagement. The attentional disengagement refers to shifting attention away from stimuli that are not relevant to task. Previous studies mainly focused on the attentional disengagement of one feature dimension. However, the mechanisms of different feature dimensions on attentional disengagement in single and conjunction visual search remain unclear. In current study, we adopted the oculomotor disengagement paradigm and used saccade latency as indicator to explore the effects of different feature dimensions of center stimuli on attentional disengagement. In both single and conjunction feature search tasks, participants began each search by fixating on a center stimulus that appeared simultaneously with search display but would not be the target. Participants were instructed to ensure the first saccade to the target location. In Experiment 1A (single feature search) and 1B (conjunction feature search), we found that the attentional disengagement was significantly delayed or accelerated when center stimuli shared color features with the target or salient distractor, but not in shape feature. Moreover, we found that the difference between two feature dimensions might be caused by their different search difficulty (Experiment 1C). Therefore, in Experiment 2, we matched the difficulty of searching for color and shape tasks before exploring whether there were differences in the effects of different feature dimensions on attentional disengagement. However, the results in Experiment 2 were similar to those in Experiment 1A, indicating that the different effects of feature dimensions on attentional disengagement were caused by feature asymmetry. Therefore, in Experiment 3, we improved the salient discernibility of shape dimension and matched color search to it. The results showed that although the attentional disengagement was delayed in shape dimension, it was still smaller than that in color dimension. Our results supported that goal-oriented attention sets were the main cause of delayed attentional disengagement. By series of experiments, we found that the utilization of different feature dimensions was associated with task difficulty and the features asymmetry in both single and conjunction visual search.

【 授权许可】

CC BY