Abstract
Key to successfully negotiating our environment is our ability to adapt to current settings based on recent experiences and behaviour. Response conflict paradigms (e.g., the Stroop task) have provided evidence for increases in executive control after errors, leading to slowed responses that are more likely to be correct, and less susceptible to response congruency effects. Here we investigate whether failures of perceptual awareness, rather than failures at decisional or response stages of information processing, lead to similar adjustments in visual attention. We employed an attentional blink task in which subjects often fail to consciously register the second of two targets embedded in a rapid serial visual presentation stream of distractors, and examined how target errors influence performance on subsequent trials. Performance was inferior after Target 2 errors and these inter-trial effects were independent of the temporal lag between the targets and were not due to more global changes in attention across runs of trials. These results shed light on the nature of attentional calibration in response to failures of perceptual consciousness.
Highlights
To overcome our severe information processing capacity limitations and interact successfully with the visual world, we must select relevant over irrelevant information from an environment that constantly changes across time and space
Trials were not sorted based on preceding T1 accuracy given that the high performance on this dependent variable limited the number of n-1 incorrect trials
Results & Discussion Figures 2 (T1) and 3 (T2) show the key results and the dependent variables were identical to those used in Experiment 1
Summary
To overcome our severe information processing capacity limitations and interact successfully with the visual world, we must select relevant over irrelevant information from an environment that constantly changes across time and space. This task is performed primarily by the attentional system and it is for this reason that the mechanisms underlying attention are a topic of intense interest to psychologists and neuroscientists [1]. The nature of the post-error adaptation (suppressing the wrong response or slowing down responses in general) is likely to reflect a substantial amount of executive control, rather than changes in selective attention
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