Great expectations: Advance knowledge and distractibility
Speaker
Diya DasInfo
Our visual environment is complex and contains both target and
distractor objects. To navigate effectively, an ability to ignore visual
distractors is as important as being able to focus on target
information. While there has been a lot of research studying target
processing, understanding of how distractors are processed is less
clear. The goal of this research was to investigate how distractors are
processed. In part I, distraction was examined as a function of spatial
information available in the display. The motivation for this comparison
was to assess predictions made by two theories of attention: Load theory
(LT) and Theory of visual attention (TVA). LT posits that attention is
allocated in a two-step process with an underlying assumption that
spatial information is available pre-attentively. TVA, on the other
hand, suggests a one-step attention allocation process, where spatial
information needs to be computed or builds up over time. To test these
predictions, distraction was compared across displays in which possible
target and distractor locations were marked with placeholders, to
displays in which no explicit spatial information was provided. If
spatial information is available pre-attentively, providing spatial
information should make no difference in distraction. Results from four
experiments show reduced distraction when spatial information was
provided compared to when it was not. This showed that spatial
information is not available pre-attentively and in the absence of any
expectation or bias, all objects are processed simultaneously. In part
II, the extent to which advance knowledge of distractor location impacts
distractor processing was examined. This study was motivated by 1) mixed
evidence of reduced distraction when a cue indicates the location of an
upcoming distractor, 2) mixed evidence for whether distractor cue leads
to inhibition at the cued location and 3) lack of knowledge around how a
distractor cue compares to target cue in impacting behavior. Results
show some benefit of cueing the location of the distractor- reduced
distraction as a function of distractor cue was seen in one out of three
experiments. Cueing the target showed the most clear impact on behavior.
Finally, there was no evidence that any benefit observed from distractor
cueing was due to inhibition at the cued location.
