| Research Abstract |
This research project attempted to elucidate attentional intervention processes, which are differentially summoned by two well-known attentional control means ; i. e. , automatic capturing by sudden stimulus change and voluntary controlled capacity allocation.
In the first year, automatic capturing was studied using RT interference by noise stimuli. When noise is presented just before target, it is well-known that noise interferes with target identification, thus increasing response latency when noise and target stimuli belong to different response classes. However, when noise presentation precedes target well in advance (say, 2 second), interference is reduced to be almost non-existent. It was found that abrupt onset of a pair of bars really restored this interference, but this was not due to attention capture, since cue can was as effective when presented ipsilateral to the noise digit as when it was presented in contralateral field.
In the second year, study of voluntary control of attention was planned. In the preliminary study, I found an interesting phenomenon related to voluntary control of attention. It was attentional facilitation of figural disapperance. When a letter ("/" or "/") was embedded in an array of noise letters ("+") , attended, rather than non-attended target disappeared. This phenomenon was observed in a systematic experiment, which is still underway.
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