Visual-spatial attention can be biased towards salient visual information without visual awareness. It is unclear, however, whether such bias can further influence free-choices such as saccades in a free viewing task. In our experiment, we presented visual cues below awareness threshold immediately before people made free saccades. Our results showed that masked cues could influence the direction and latency of the first free saccade, suggesting that salient visual information can unconsciously influence free actions.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2014.07.009 | DOI Listing |
Atten Percept Psychophys
January 2025
Department of Psychology, Chungnam National University, Daejeon, Republic of Korea.
The issue of whether a salient stimulus in the visual field captures attention in a stimulus-driven manner has been debated for several decades. The attentional window account proposed to resolve this issue by claiming that a salient stimulus captures attention and interferes with target processing only when an attentional window is set wide enough to encompass both the target and the salient distractor. By contrast, when a small attentional window is serially shifted among individual stimuli to find a target, no capture is found.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCortex
December 2024
Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.
The human visual system is tuned to symmetry, and the neural response to visual symmetry has been well studied. One line of research measures an Event Related Potential (ERP) component called the Sustained Posterior Negativity (SPN). Amplitude is more negative at posterior electrodes when participants see symmetrical patterns compared to asymmetrical patterns.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAtten Percept Psychophys
January 2025
Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Van Der Boechorststraat 7, 1081 BT, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
In previous studies, it was established that individuals can implicitly learn spatiotemporal regularities related to how the distribution of target locations unfolds across the time course of a single trial. However, these regularities were tied to the appearance of salient targets that are known to capture attention in a bottom-up way. The current study investigated whether the saliency of target is necessary for this type of learning to occur.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInterference from a salient distractor is typically reduced when the appearance of the distractor follows either spatial or feature-based regularities. Although there is a growing body of literature on distractor location learning, the understanding of distractor feature learning remains limited. In the current study, we investigated distractor feature learning by using EEG measures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNavigating visually complex environments requires focusing on relevant information while filtering out (salient) distractions. The signal suppression hypothesis posits that salient stimuli generate an automatic saliency signal that captures attention unless overridden by learned suppression mechanisms. In support of this, ERP studies have demonstrated that salient stimuli that do not capture attention elicit a distractor positivity (PD), a putative neural index of suppression.
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