Abstract
Conflict detection in sensory input is central to adaptive human behavior. Perhaps unsurprisingly, past research has shown that conflict may even be detected in the absence of conflict awareness, suggesting that conflict detection is an automatic process that does not require attention. To test the possibility of conflict processing in the absence of attention, we manipulated task relevance and response overlap of potentially conflicting stimulus features across six behavioral tasks. Multivariate analyses on human electroencephalographic data revealed neural signatures of conflict only when at least one feature of a conflicting stimulus was attended, regardless of whether that feature was part of the conflict, or overlaps with the response. In contrast, neural signatures of basic sensory processes were present even when a stimulus was completely unattended. These data reveal an attentional bottleneck at the level of objects, suggesting that object-based attention is a prerequisite for cognitive control operations involved in conflict detection.
Highlights
Every day we are bombarded with sensory information from the environment and we often face the challenge of selecting the relevant information and ignoring irrelevant –potentially conflicting– information to maximize performance
We aim to test whether cognitive control operations, necessary to identify and resolve conflicting sensory input, are operational when that input is irrelevant for the task at hand and what role object-based attention may have in conflict detection
Task, VO: volume oddball detection task, LD: location discrimination task, VRDM: vertical RDM task. ±: p < .06, n.s.: p > .06. It has been hypothesized for a long time that only basic physical properties of task-irrelevant sensory input are processed (Treisman & Gelade, 1980), over the past few years an overabundance of processes have been found to be preserved in the absence of attention (Fahrenfort et al, 2017; Li et al, 2002; Peelen et al, 2009)
Summary
Every day we are bombarded with sensory information from the environment and we often face the challenge of selecting the relevant information and ignoring irrelevant –potentially conflicting– information to maximize performance These selection processes require much effort and our full attention, sometimes rendering us deceptively oblivious to irrelevant sensory input (e.g. chest-banging apes), as illustrated by the famous inattentional blindness phenomenon (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Unattended events that are not relevant for the current task might still capture our attention or interfere with ongoing task performance, for example when they are inherently relevant to us (e.g. our own name) This is illustrated by another famous psychological phenomenon: the cocktail party effect (Cherry, 1953; Moray, 1959). It is currently a matter of debate which processes require top-down attention
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