Searching for two things at once: establishment of multiple attentional control settings on a trial-by-trial basis

Zachary J J Roper; Shaun P Vecera

doi:10.3758/s13423-012-0297-8

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Searching for two things at once: establishment of multiple attentional control settings on a trial-by-trial basis

Journal article

Peer reviewed

Searching for two things at once: establishment of multiple attentional control settings on a trial-by-trial basis

Zachary J J Roper and Shaun P Vecera

Psychonomic bulletin & review, Vol.19(6), pp.1114-1121

12/2012

DOI: 10.3758/s13423-012-0297-8

PMID: 22971903

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Abstract

Recent work has demonstrated that attention can be configured to multiple potential targets in spatial search. However, this previous work relied on a fixed set of targets across multiple trials, allowing observers to offload attentional control settings to longer-term representations. In the present experiments, we demonstrate multiple attentional control settings that operate independently of space (Experiments 1 and 2). More important, we show that observers can be cued to different control settings on a trial-by-trial basis (Experiment 3). The latter result suggests that observers were capable of maintaining multiple control settings when the demands of the task required an attentional search for specific feature values. Attention can be configured to extract multiple feature values in a goal-directed manner, and this configuration can be can be dynamically engaged on a trial-by-trial basis. These results support recent findings that reveal the high precision, complexity, and flexibility of attentional control settings.

Space Perception - physiology

Attention - physiology

Humans

Attentional Blink

Reaction Time

Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology

Photic Stimulation

Color Perception - physiology

Details

Title: Subtitle: Searching for two things at once: establishment of multiple attentional control settings on a trial-by-trial basis
Creators: Zachary J J Roper - Department of Psychology, University of Iowa, E11 Seashore Hall, Iowa City, IA 52242-1407, USA. zachary-roper@uiowa.edu
Shaun P Vecera
Resource Type: Journal article
Publication Details: Psychonomic bulletin & review, Vol.19(6), pp.1114-1121
DOI: 10.3758/s13423-012-0297-8
PMID: 22971903
NLM abbreviation: Psychon Bull Rev
ISSN: 1069-9384
eISSN: 1531-5320
Publisher: United States
Grant note: R01AG026027 / NIA NIH HHS
Language: English
Date published: 12/2012
Academic Unit: Psychological and Brain Sciences; Iowa Neuroscience Institute
Record Identifier: 9984002403802771

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