Voluntariness based separation of attentional mechanisms in a visual search task: A possible indication for a new paradigm

摘要

Attentional mechanisms are of primary concern in psychology, and recent research [11] has given rise to new questions on what modulates the so-called "top-down" attention. In the present study, voluntariness, controlled as the presence or absence of freedom of choice, is investigated as a modulator of visual attention. An experiment was conducted where participants were shown a cue with four colored squares - either all squares had the same color or all different - and were instructed to pick a color to pay attention to in the following visual search task. In the case of ail squares having the same color, no choice was possible and the trial was considered involuntary; the other case voluntary. It was expected that voluntariness acts as an attentional effect of reward [2], improving performance on voluntary attention trials. This hypothesis was confirmed to be true in regards to reaction time: voluntary trials were significantly faster by 16 ms compared to involuntary ones; but showed conflicting results in regards to hit rate: voluntary trials had a significant 10% decrease in accuracy compared to involuntary ones. This begs the question if this voluntariness-based attentional effect reflects a trade-off relationship in the same attentional process or is due to different voluntary and involuntary mechanisms of attention.