Control of Visual Attention: Role of Stimulus Significance

人类受到大量感官输入的影响。 然而，通常情况下，我们只注意到这些输入中的一小部分;我们对感官事件的意识和后来的记忆主要局限于这一子集。 虽然研究已经揭示了大脑的选择过程是如何工作的，但这些知识在很大程度上局限于人工任务，在这些任务中，人们被明确指示要注意任意定义的刺激类别。 本研究将探讨的机制和原则，管理自发分配的视觉注意，在没有这样的具体任务的要求，或在某些情况下，甚至在反对自愿任务的目标。 一组研究将检验与短期记忆内容相关的视觉输入自动获得注意力优先权的发现，即使个体试图阻止这种情况。 其他研究将探讨人们普遍观察到的一个人自己的名字吸引他或她的注意力的趋势;将探讨这种现象的局限性和原因。 第三组研究将考察刺激新奇性的影响，而最后一组研究将考察情绪突出刺激引起注意的倾向。情绪对注意力影响的时间过程将比以前的工作更详细地进行研究。 总体结果应该提供一个更广泛，更现实的画面，如何控制视觉注意力，并帮助确定过程中影响人类的表现在各种现实世界的任务。 对这些现象的更好理解应该证明在需要人们快速准确响应的系统设计中是有用的（例如，飞机驾驶舱），并可能对目击者的记忆也有影响。

Human beings are subjected to a vast barrage of sensory inputs. Typically, however, we attend to only a tiny subset of these inputs; our awareness and later memory of sensory events is mostly confined to this subset. While research has revealed something of how the brain's selection processes works, this knowledge is largely confined to artificial tasks in which people are explicitly instructed to attend to arbitrarily defined classes of stimuli. The present studies will explore mechanisms and principles that govern the spontaneous allocation of visual attention in the absence of such specific task demands, or in some cases, even work in opposition to voluntary task goals. One set of studies will examine the finding that visual inputs related to the contents of short-term memory automatically receive attentional priority, even when the individual attempts to prevent this. Other studies will examine the commonly observed tendency for an individual's own name to draw his or her attention; the limitations and causes of this phenomenon will be explored. A third set of studies will examine the effects of stimulus novelty, while the final set will examine the tendency of emotionally salient stimuli to draw attention. The time course of emotional effects on attention will be examined in much finer detail than previous work has allowed. The overall results should provide a broader and more realistic picture of how visual attention is controlled, and help identify processes that affect human performance in a variety of real-world tasks. Better understanding of these phenomena should prove useful in design of systems requiring rapid and accurate responses from people (e.g., airplane cockpits) and may have implications for eyewitness memory as well.