Attention to a Moment in Time Impairs Episodic Distinctiveness during Rapid Serial Visual Presentation

Pierpaolo Zivi,Stefano Sdoia,Fabio Ferlazzo

doi:10.3390/sym13101938

Abstract

Human attention is limited in the ability to select and segregate relevant distinct events from the continuous flow of external information while concurrently encoding their temporal succession. While it is well-known that orienting attention to one external target stimulus impairs the encoding of ensuing relevant external events, it is still unknown whether orienting attention to internally generated events can interfere with concurrent processing of external input. We addressed this issue by asking participants to identify a single target embedded among distractors in a non-spatial rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream and to indicate whether that target appeared before or after an internally estimated midpoint of the stream. The results indicate that (a) such an internally generated temporal benchmark does not interfere with the identification of a subsequent physical target stimulus but (b) the two events cannot be accurately segregated when the physical target immediately follows the internally generated temporal event. These findings indicate that the asymmetrical distribution around the midpoint of order reversals reflects an impaired temporal discrimination ability. Orienting attention to a moment in time reduces episodic distinctiveness as much as orienting attention to external events.

Highlights

Human optimal adaptation to the environment relies on the ability to identify goalrelevant events at the expense of irrelevant ones, along with the temporal information they convey [1], especially when multiple or fast-changing pieces of information must be managed concurrently or in rapid succession [2].It is well known that these abilities come with costs
Found even when one of these two targets does not consist of a physical event, but Toatest whether participants had effectively lost their ability to temporally rather temporal event
We manipulated the relative positionsegregate of these the target the benchmark at Lag we compared their performance theofone two targets,from the internal benchmark and1,the physical target, and assessed thewith effects the expected by chance,and as if they were the temporal localization thetarget targetidentifi(50% of temporal distance the order of guessing presentation of the two events on of both before/after responses)

Summary

Introduction

Human optimal adaptation to the environment relies on the ability to identify goalrelevant events at the expense of irrelevant ones, along with the temporal information they convey [1], especially when multiple or fast-changing pieces of information must be managed concurrently or in rapid succession [2].It is well known that these abilities come with costs. When focusing on task-relevant information, the ability of consciously reporting or responding to other subsequent information is usually impaired [4,5] One such procedure is the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), whereby visual events rapidly succeed one another in foveal vision at a rate of about ten items per second. Information about the temporal order of stimuli is usually lost (e.g., they are frequently reported in reversed order) [6,7,8,9] It seems that attentional constraints on visual perception do not allow for both the identity and the temporal order of two rapidly presented relevant visual events to undergo full processing simultaneously

Methods

Results

Conclusion