Abstract

It has been demonstrated in the literature that cues in the environment that are predictive of how a task ought to be performed can influence performance. In an extension of this general notion, Cosman and Vecera (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 39(3), 836-848, 2013) reported that simply performing singleton and feature search tasks when irrelevant scenes were displayed in the background automatically modulated the search strategies adopted by participants when these scenes were reinstated at a later time. While intriguing, this result was also somewhat surprising given that an adaptive system (like the human brain) should disregard irrelevant information so task competencies generalize across environments. To investigate this issue further, we replicated the experimental procedures of Cosman and Vecera, while varying whether the test phase was either a singleton search (Experiments 1 and 3) or a feature search (Experiment 2) task. While it was observed that the nature of the search task varied whether a color singleton distractor influenced performance, there was no evidence that background scenes modulated the search strategies adopted by participants, contrasting the results of Cosman and Vecera. Overall, the findings here support the conclusion that the visual system prioritizes task-relevant information while disregarding irrelevant background information.

摘要

在文献中已经证明，在环境中提示可以预测应该如何执行任务会影响性能。作为这一一般概念的扩展，Cosman和Vecera（实验心理学杂志：人类的感知和表现39（3），836-848，2013）报告说，当不相关的场景显示在后台时，简单地执行单身和特征搜索任务会在以后恢复这些场景时自动调整参与者采用的搜索策略。有趣的是，鉴于自适应系统（如人脑）应忽略无关信息，因此任务胜任力在整个环境中普遍存在，因此该结果也有些令人惊讶。为了进一步研究该问题，我们重复了Cosman和Vecera的实验步骤，同时改变了测试阶段是单例搜索（实验1和3）还是特征搜索（实验2）任务。尽管观察到搜索任务的性质会因颜色单调干扰因素是否影响性能而有所不同，没有证据表明背景场景会调节参与者采用的搜索策略，从而与Cosman和Vecera的结果形成对比。总的来说，这里的发现支持这样的结论，即视觉系统优先考虑与任务相关的信息，而忽略无关的背景信息。