Is Capture of Attention Purely Stimulus-Driven Or Contingent Upon Goal-Driven Settings?
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The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts ORIENTING VISUAL ATTENTION IN SPACE: IS CAPTURE OF ATTENTION PURELY STIMULUS-DRIVEN OR CONTINGENT UPON GOAL-DRIVEN SETTINGS? A Thesis in Psychology by Peggy Chen © 2007 Peggy Chen Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2007 The thesis of Peggy Chen was reviewed and approved* by the following: J. Toby Mordkoff Associate Professor of Psychology Thesis Advisor Chair of Committee Cathleen Moore Associate Professor of Psychology Rick Gilmore Associate Professor of Psychology Octavia Camps Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering Melvin Mark Professor of Psychology Head of the Department of Psychology *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii ABSTRACT Visuospatial attention refers to the selection of stimuli that appear in the location to which attention is oriented. One way to allocate attention to a certain location (in the absence of eye-movements) is driven by stimuli. This occurs when a salient, external stimulus captures attention, such as when attention is drawn to a bright, flashing light. The present study focuses on the question: Is attention captured by any and all salient stimuli, or only by stimuli that contain the attribute that defines the target? Two hypotheses have been presented to answer this question. Contingent Capture argues that a stimulus can only capture attention when it contains some attributes in common with the target or what is currently relevant to the task. In opposition to Contingent Capture, Rapid Disengagement posits that stimuli that do not contain the target-defining attribute can capture attention but rather briefly. Two independent experiments were conducted. The behavioral experiment provided findings consistent with Contingent Capture. However, the psychophysiological experiment did not provide an answer to the addressed question. Therefore, evidence up to this point favors Contingent Capture over Rapid Disengagement. That is, attentional capture is modulated by goal-driven control settings. At the same time, however, the present work also raises questions concerning the approaches that have been employed in the study of visual attention. Future lines of research are suggested. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES .....................................................................................................vi LIST OF TABLES.......................................................................................................ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.........................................................................................x Chapter 1 Introduction ................................................................................................1 Attention........................................................................................................1 Visual Attention.............................................................................................2 Visuospatial Attention...................................................................................2 Attentional Capture .......................................................................................7 Folk, Johnston, & Remington, 1992..............................................................13 An alternative to Contingent Capture: Rapid Disengagement ......................16 To Test Rapid Disengagement ......................................................................17 Chapter 2 Contingent Cuing with a Short SOA..........................................................19 Short-SOA Experiments................................................................................20 Short but not Zero SOA.................................................................................23 Modifications of Folk et al. (1992) Parameters.............................................27 Experiment I .........................................................................................................29 Method...........................................................................................................29 Results ...........................................................................................................33 Discussion......................................................................................................35 Chapter 3 Background: the Choice of N2pc...............................................................38 Neurophysiological Methods.........................................................................39 Event-Related Potentials ...............................................................................41 N2pc ..............................................................................................................47 Chapter 4 Contingent Cuing with ERP.......................................................................52 Prior ERP Experiments..................................................................................53 N2pc: Index of Attentional Capture ..............................................................56 Experiment II........................................................................................................58 Method...........................................................................................................58 Behavioral Results and Discussion ...............................................................60 Electrophysiological Results and Discussion................................................64 Chapter 5 General Discussion.....................................................................................69 v Summary........................................................................................................69 Why is the N2pc Absent? ..............................................................................72 Conclusion.....................................................................................................75 Bibliography ................................................................................................................77 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1-1: The exogenous cuing paradigm used in Folk, Remington, and Johnston (1992). The actual display was presented on a black background. All black lines in this figure were actually white in the real presentation. There were two types of Target: Onset (Figure 1A) and Color (Figure 1B), and two types of Cue: Onset and Color. Cue Attributes and Target Attributes were combined to yield four cue-target situations: Onset Target preceded by a congruent (onset) Cue or incongruent (color) Cue; Color Target following a congruent (color) cue or incongruent (onset) cue.................................................15 Figure 1-2: Mean response times as a function of Target Attribute, Cue Attribute, and Cue Validity in Folk et al. (1992). (Adapted from Figure 2 in Folk et al., 1992).....................................................................................................................16 Figure 2-1: With the current experiment setting of contingent cuing, what displays would look like if the cue and the target occurred simultaneously. Divided by the dash line, the left panel shows the congruent condition as the cue and the target share the same attribute (onset or color). The right panel shows the incongruent condition as the cue does not contain the target- defining attribute. In each condition, examples of valid and invalid cuing are given. ....................................................................................................................24 Figure 2-2: The actual display was presented on a black background. All black lines in this figure were actually white or grey in the real presentation. There were two types of Target: Onset (Figure 1A) and Color (Figure 1B), and two types of Cue: Onset and Color. Cue Attributes and Target Attributes were combined to yield four cue-target situations: Onset Target preceded by a congruent (onset) Cue or incongruent (color) Cue; Color Target following a congruent (color) cue or incongruent (onset) cue.................................................31 Figure 2-3: Mean response times as a function of Target Attribute, Cue Attribute, and Cue Validity...................................................................................................34 Figure 3-1: The international 10-20 electrode system. 10-20 refers to the placing of electrodes at sites 10% and 20% from certain anatomical landmarks as shown on the left. The right side of the figure depicts the electrode position from viewing the top of the head. The letters refer to areas of the brain, F for frontal, C for central, T for temporal, P for parietal, and O for occipital. Numerical subscripts indicate the brain hemisphere (odd numbers for left and even numbers for right). Subscript “z” indicates “zenith,” referring to the midline placement.................................................................................................42 vii Figure 3-2: Extraction of the ERP waveform from the ongoing EEG. Time zero is locked to the stimulus onset. (a) Stimuli (1… N) are presented while the EEG is being recorded, but the specific response to each stimulus is too small to be seen in the noisy EEG. (b) To isolate the ERP from the ongoing EEG, the EEG epochs or segments are extracted and averaged to create the ERP waveform. Note that negative voltage is plotted up by convention. The waveforms are hypothetical. (Adapted from Luck et al., 2000)...........................44