Top-down attentional settings can persist between two unrelated tasks, influencing visual attention and performance. This study investigated whether top-down contextual information in a second task could moderate this “attentional inertia” effect. Forty participants searched through letter strings arranged horizontally, vertically, or randomly and then made a judgement about road, nature, or fractal images. Eye movements were recorded to the picture search and findings showed greater horizontal search in the pictures following horizontal letter strings and narrower horizontal search following vertical letter strings, but only in the first 1000 ms. This shows a brief persistence of attentional settings, consistent with past findings. Crucially, attentional inertia did not vary according to image type. This indicates that top-down contextual biases within a scene have limited impact on the persistence of previously relevant, but now irrelevant, attentional settings.

自上而下的注意力设置可以在两个不相关的任务之间持续存在，影响视觉注意力和表现。这项研究调查了第二项任务中自上而下的上下文信息是否可以缓和这种“注意力惯性”效应。四十名参与者搜索水平、垂直或随机排列的字符串，然后对道路、自然或分形图像做出判断。眼球运动被记录到图片搜索中，发现在水平字母串之后的图片中水平搜索更大，而垂直字母串之后的水平搜索更窄，但仅限于前 1000 毫秒。这显示了注意力设置的短暂持续，与过去的发现一致。至关重要的是，注意力惯性不会因图像类型而异。