Perceptual load is not always a crucial determinant of early versus late selection☆
Section snippets
A proposed resolution to the early-versus-late selection controversy
Lavie and colleagues (Lavie, 1995; Lavie & Tsal, 1994) have proposed that perceptual load is a crucial determinant of whether selection in the visual modality occurs early or late. Perceptual load refers to the demands that identifying task-relevant visual stimuli impose on perceptual attention. When identifying such stimuli is relatively easy (i.e., when perceptual load is low), the perceptual load hypothesis posits there are sufficient perceptual resources remaining to identify task-irrelevant
Is the overall congruency effect an exhaustive measure of whether participants identify a distractor?
Contrary to the assumptions of the perceptual load hypothesis, Cosman and colleagues (Cosman, Mordkoff, & Vecera, 2016) recently suggested that the congruency effect is not an exhaustive measure of whether distractors are identified. They suggested that the congruency effect depends not only on identifying the distractor but also on post-identification processes that map the distractor onto an arbitrary response. In this view, a failure of stimulus-response (S-R) translation for the distractor,
The present study
Given the limitations of Cosman et al.'s (2016) study, we revisited the issue of whether perceptual load influences whether selection occurs early or late in the standard flanker task. Moreover, we employed a complementary measure of distractor processing – the congruency sequence effect (CSE) – to provide a novel test of the perceptual load hypothesis. The CSE is a phenomenon wherein the congruency effect differs after incongruent relative to congruent trials (Gratton, Coles, & Donchin, 1992).
Experiment 1
In Experiment 1, we investigated whether a CSE is present under conditions of high perceptual load even when there is no overall congruency effect. To this end, we employed Cosman et al.’s (2016) standard flanker task (see also, Lavie, 1995). As described earlier, the perceptual load hypothesis posits that participants fail to identify distractors under conditions of high perceptual load and, therefore, predicts no CSE will be observed (Lavie, 1995). In contrast, other views predict a typical
Experiment 2
The goal of Experiment 2 was to investigate whether presenting the non-target items in high-load search arrays in the same relative positions across trials reduces or eliminates the reverse CSE we observed in Experiment 1. This manipulation should reduce demands on visual search and thereby reduce the degree to which increasing perceptual load increases overall task difficulty. It should also reduce the degree to which salient contextual features of the display change in consecutive trials. We
General discussion
The present study revealed an important, novel result. In particular, it revealed evidence that distractors are identified in high-load trials even when there is no overall congruency effect. As described next, this finding has important implications for the literature on selective attention.
Conclusion
Our findings suggest that perceptual load is not always a crucial determinant of whether selection occurs early or late. Specifically, they provide evidence that participants identify irrelevant distractors in the standard flanker task not only when perceptual load is low, but also when perceptual load is high and there is no overall congruency effect. Future work investigating whether our findings generalize to other tasks may shed additional light on the conditions under which perceptual load
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Cited by (0)
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The authors thank Toby Mordkoff and Tessa Abagis for helpful feedback on a draft of this manuscript, and Lauren Grant and Sandra Oska for assisting with data collection.