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Context and competition in the capture of visual attention

Competition-based models of visual attention propose that perceptual ambiguity is resolved through inhibition, which is stronger when objects share a greater number of neural receptive fields (RFs). According to this theory, the misallocation of attention to a salient distractor—that is, the capture...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Hickey, Clayton, Theeuwes, Jan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer-Verlag 2011
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3204046/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21739337
http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13414-011-0168-9
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author Hickey, Clayton
Theeuwes, Jan
author_facet Hickey, Clayton
Theeuwes, Jan
author_sort Hickey, Clayton
collection PubMed
description Competition-based models of visual attention propose that perceptual ambiguity is resolved through inhibition, which is stronger when objects share a greater number of neural receptive fields (RFs). According to this theory, the misallocation of attention to a salient distractor—that is, the capture of attention—can be indexed in RF-scaled interference costs. We used this pattern to investigate distractor-related costs in visual search across several manipulations of temporal context. Distractor costs are generally larger under circumstances in which the distractor can be defined by features that have recently characterised the target, suggesting that capture occurs in these trials. However, our results show that search for a target in the presence of a salient distractor also produces RF-scaled costs when the features defining the target and distractor do not vary from trial to trial. Contextual differences in distractor costs appear to reflect something other than capture, perhaps a qualitative difference in the type of attentional mechanism deployed to the distractor.
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spelling pubmed-32040462011-11-10 Context and competition in the capture of visual attention Hickey, Clayton Theeuwes, Jan Atten Percept Psychophys Article Competition-based models of visual attention propose that perceptual ambiguity is resolved through inhibition, which is stronger when objects share a greater number of neural receptive fields (RFs). According to this theory, the misallocation of attention to a salient distractor—that is, the capture of attention—can be indexed in RF-scaled interference costs. We used this pattern to investigate distractor-related costs in visual search across several manipulations of temporal context. Distractor costs are generally larger under circumstances in which the distractor can be defined by features that have recently characterised the target, suggesting that capture occurs in these trials. However, our results show that search for a target in the presence of a salient distractor also produces RF-scaled costs when the features defining the target and distractor do not vary from trial to trial. Contextual differences in distractor costs appear to reflect something other than capture, perhaps a qualitative difference in the type of attentional mechanism deployed to the distractor. Springer-Verlag 2011-07-08 2011 /pmc/articles/PMC3204046/ /pubmed/21739337 http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13414-011-0168-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2011 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
spellingShingle Article
Hickey, Clayton
Theeuwes, Jan
Context and competition in the capture of visual attention
title Context and competition in the capture of visual attention
title_full Context and competition in the capture of visual attention
title_fullStr Context and competition in the capture of visual attention
title_full_unstemmed Context and competition in the capture of visual attention
title_short Context and competition in the capture of visual attention
title_sort context and competition in the capture of visual attention
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3204046/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21739337
http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13414-011-0168-9
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