Penetrating the fog of the decoupled mind: The effects of visual salience in the sustained attention to response task.

Abstract

An absence of coupling between cognition and perception can mean that the mind neglects the careful processing of information relevant to the task at hand and errors can ensue. Given that highly salient perceptual events can automatically capture attention, the current study explored whether the same neglect of task-relevant information was possible for stimuli with high levels of perceptual saliency (e.g., identifiable by colour). In four experiments, participants performed a go/no-go task with a low frequency of no-go events. Across all experiments, response inhibition was more successful for coloured no-go targets than for stimuli that shared the same colour as the go targets. In addition, the response time (reaction time [RT]) for rare, coloured go targets was slower than when the same events were noncolored. Together, these results suggest that in relatively simple go/no-go tasks, highly salient perceptual events capture attention in an automatic fashion. Increased visual salience is argued to be beneficial when associated with no-go targets because it momentarily enforces coupling between attention and perception, disrupting ongoing behaviour at the precise moment when not responding is the correct action to take. These results suggest that although the mind may at times neglect events in the environment, salient perceptual events cannot be ignored in the same way.