Dataset Information

Distractor suppression when attention fails: behavioral evidence for a flexible selective attention mechanism.

ABSTRACT: Despite consistent evidence showing that attention is a multifaceted mechanism that can operate at multiple levels of processing depending on the structure and demands of the task, investigations of the attentional blink phenomenon have consistently shown that the impairment in reporting the second of two targets typically occurs at a late, or post-perceptual, stage of processing. This suggests that the attentional blink phenomenon may represent the operation of a unique attentional mechanism that is not as flexible as other attentional mechanisms. To test whether the attentional blink is a fixed or flexible phenomenon, we manipulated first target task demands (i.e., difficulty) and measured the influence this had on processing a subsequently presented distractor and the second target. If the attentional blink represents a mechanism that is fixed and consistently fails at a single stage of processing, then manipulations of task difficulty should not affect distractor processing. However, if the attentional blink represents a more multifaceted and flexible mechanism, then task difficulty should modulate distractor processing. The results revealed that distractor processing during the AB was attenuated under high task difficulty. In addition, unlike previous studies, we failed to find a correlation between distractor processing and the severity of the attentional blink. Using a simulation, we demonstrate that the previously reported correlations may have been spurious and due to using variables that were not independent. Overall, the present results support the conclusion that the selectivity of attention during the AB is flexible and depends on the structure and demands of the task.

SUBMITTER: Elliott JC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4411164 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Distractor suppression when attention fails: behavioral evidence for a flexible selective attention mechanism.

Elliott James C JC Giesbrecht Barry B

PloS one 20150427 4

Despite consistent evidence showing that attention is a multifaceted mechanism that can operate at multiple levels of processing depending on the structure and demands of the task, investigations of the attentional blink phenomenon have consistently shown that the impairment in reporting the second of two targets typically occurs at a late, or post-perceptual, stage of processing. This suggests that the attentional blink phenomenon may represent the operation of a unique attentional mechanism th ...[more]

PMID: 25915934

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Project description:The role of the spatial separation between the stimulating electrodes (electrode separation) in sequential stream segregation was explored in cochlear implant (CI) listeners using a deviant detection task. Twelve CI listeners were instructed to attend to a series of target sounds in the presence of interleaved distractor sounds. A deviant was randomly introduced in the target stream either at the beginning, middle or end of each trial. The listeners were asked to detect sequences that contained a deviant and to report its location within the trial. The perceptual segregation of the streams should, therefore, improve deviant detection performance. The electrode range for the distractor sounds was varied, resulting in different amounts of overlap between the target and the distractor streams. For the largest electrode separation condition, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded under active and passive listening conditions. The listeners were asked to perform the behavioral task for the active listening condition and encouraged to watch a muted movie for the passive listening condition. Deviant detection performance improved with increasing electrode separation between the streams, suggesting that larger electrode differences facilitate the segregation of the streams. Deviant detection performance was best for deviants happening late in the sequence, indicating that a segregated percept builds up over time. The analysis of the ERP waveforms revealed that auditory selective attention modulates the ERP responses in CI listeners. Specifically, the responses to the target stream were, overall, larger in the active relative to the passive listening condition. Conversely, the ERP responses to the distractor stream were not affected by selective attention. However, no significant correlation was observed between the behavioral performance and the amount of attentional modulation. Overall, the findings from the present study suggest that CI listeners can use electrode separation to perceptually group sequential sounds. Moreover, selective attention can be deployed on the resulting auditory objects, as reflected by the attentional modulation of the ERPs at the group level.

Dataset Information

Distractor suppression when attention fails: behavioral evidence for a flexible selective attention mechanism.

Publications

Distractor suppression when attention fails: behavioral evidence for a flexible selective attention mechanism.

Similar Datasets

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