Intrusive effects of semantic information on visual selective attention

Malcolm, George L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4892-5961, Rattinger, Michelle and Shomstein, Sarah (2016) Intrusive effects of semantic information on visual selective attention. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 78 (7). 2066–2078. ISSN 1943-3921

Preview	PDF (Published manuscript) - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (672kB) | Preview
Preview	PDF (Accepted manscript) - Accepted Version Download (939kB) | Preview

Abstract

Every object contains semantic information in extension to its low-level properties. It is well documented that such information biases attention when it is necessary for an ongoing task. However, whether semantic relationships influence attentional selection when they are irrelevant to the ongoing task remains an open question. The ubiquitous nature of semantic information suggests that it could bias attention even when these properties are irrelevant. In the present study, three objects appeared on screen, two of which were semantically related. After a varying time interval, a target or distractor appeared on top of each object. The objects’ semantic relationships never predicted target location. Despite this, a semantic bias on attentional allocation was observed with an initial, transient bias to semantically related objects. Further experiments demonstrated that this effect was contingent on the objects being attended: if an object never contained the target, it no longer exerted a semantic influence. In a final set of experiments, we demonstrate that semantic bias is robust and appears even in the presence of more predictive cues (spatial probability). The results suggest that as long as an object is attended, its semantic properties bias attention, even if it is irrelevant to an ongoing task and there are more predictive factors available.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	visual attention,semantic information,scene processing
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Cognition, Action and Perception Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Developmental Science
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	26 May 2016 15:00
Last Modified:	22 Oct 2022 01:12
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/59093
DOI:	10.3758/s13414-016-1156-x

Downloads

Actions (login required)

View Item