Name: a dual task procedure combined with rapid serial visual presentation to test attentional blink for nontargets
Uploaded: 2014-12-05T14:00:00
Description: Watch this Scientific Journal Video about A Dual Task Procedure Combined with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to Test Attentional Blink for Nontargets at JoVE.com

The authors have no acknowledgements.

NOTE: All subjects must give informed written consent before the experimental protocol. All procedures, consent forms, and the experimental protocol must be approved by the local Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects.
1. Preparing the Subject for the Experiment
<ol>
	<li>Recruit participants from the local area and compensate them for their time. The participants must have normal or corrected-to-normal visual acuity and English as their first language.</li>
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	<li>Raymond, J. E., Shapiro, K. L., Arnell, K. M. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Temporary+suppression+of+visual+processing+in+an+RSVP+task:+An+attentional+blink.">Temporary suppression of visual processing in an RSVP task: An attentional blink.</a> J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 18 (3), 849-860 (1992).</li><li>Dux, P. E., Marois, R. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=The+attentional+blink:+A+review+of+data+and+theory.">The attentional blink: A review of data and theory.</a> Atten Percept Psychophys. 71 (8), 1683-1700 (2009).</li><li>Desimone, R., Duncan, J. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Neural+mechanisms+of+selective+visual+attention.">Neural mechanisms of selective visual attention.</a> Annu Rev Neurosci. 18 (1), 193-222 (1995).</li><li>Reynolds, J. H., Heeger, D. J. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=The+normalization+model+of+attention.">The normalization model of attention.</a> Neuron. 61 (2), 168-185 (2009).</li><li>Nieuwenstein, M. R., Potter, M. C. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Temporal+Limits+of+Selection+and+Memory+Encoding:+A+Comparison+of+Whole+versus+Partial+Report+in+Rapid+Serial+Visual+Presentation.">Temporal Limits of Selection and Memory Encoding: A Comparison of Whole versus Partial Report in Rapid Serial Visual Presentation.</a> Psychol Sci. 17 (6), 471-475 (2006).</li><li>Potter, M. C., Nieuwenstein, M., Strohminger, N. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Whole+report+versus+partial+report+in+RSVP+sentences.">Whole report versus partial report in RSVP sentences.</a> J Mem Lang. 58 (4), 907-915 (2008).</li><li>Loach, D., Mar&#237;-Beffa, P. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Post-target+inhibition:+A+temporal+binding+mechanism.">Post-target inhibition: A temporal binding mechanism.</a> Visual Cognition. 10 (5), 513-526 (2003).</li><li>Meng, M., Potter, M. C. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=An+attentional+blink+for+nontargets.">An attentional blink for nontargets.</a> Atten Percept Psychophys. 73 (2), 440-446 (2010).</li><li>Battig, W. F., Montague, W. E. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Category+norms+for+verbal+items+in+56+categories.">Category norms for verbal items in 56 categories.</a> J. Exp. Psychol. 80 (3), 46 (1969).</li><li>Marcus, M. P., Marcinkiewicz, M. A., Santorini, B. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Building+a+large+annotated+corpus+of+English:+The+Penn+Treebank.">Building a large annotated corpus of English: The Penn Treebank.</a> Computational linguistics. 19 (2), 313-330 (1993).</li></ol>

This novel dual-task approach combined a categorical RSVP detection task with two-alternative forced choice memory tasks immediately following the detection task. Our representative results replicate a previously published study8, showing that target detection may impair memory encoding of nontargets that are presented after the target, especially at the lag-2 position in RSVP. At a glance, this is an effect similar to AB with lag-1 sparing that suggests transient attention modulated by target detection8<...

Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) has been used to show that there is an attentional blink (AB) when two targets are presented sequentially within about 500 msec1. If the second target is presented within about 150 msec, however, there is enhancement in the processing of both targets (e.g., lag-1 sparing)2. A similar phenomenon has been found in spatial attention studies. Both the biased competition model of selective attention3 and the normalization model of attention4 suggest that attention enhances the processing of items presented in the attended location but suppresses the processing of nearby items. Could this spatial proximity suppression also explain the temporal AB of subsequent items, both nontargets and targets?
Past studies have looked at memory of a presentation of items and found AB when participants were instructed to partially report the sequence of items, but not when participants were instructed to report the entire sequence5,6. These results suggest that when attention is allocated over all the words in a sequence, there is no AB, and the span of attention is large. Since the above experiment included all or half of the words as targets, what would happen if participants were told to only look for one target, and all other words were nontargets? Is there AB for nontargets?
Loach and Mari-Beffa published a study about the influence of target detection on memory for distractors, and found the memory for a distractor was inhibited based on its proximity to the target7. This indirect design, however, was limited to using only four letters (X, H, S, and O), with any of the letters being a target, critical distractor, or probe. Letters that were never presented as targets or probes would be the remaining distractors.
To overcome the limitations in previous studies, a novel dual-task procedure was developed by Meng and Potter to investigate whether the detection of a target would suppress processing of nearby nontargets8. This paper describes this procedure in detail. First, participants searched a sequence of RSVP words for a categorical target word. Second, there was a memory task involving words that were present in the RSVP task, but were not the target. In this procedure, the nontarget words were distractors. The nontarget words, which would be tested in the memory task, had to be attended and remembered by the subject. In each trial, new words would be used; therefore nontarget words were never presented as a target.

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a dual task procedure combined with rapid serial visual presentation to test attentional blink for nontargets

When viewers search for targets in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream, if two targets are presented within about 500 msec of each other, the first target may be easy to spot but the second is likely to be missed. This phenomenon of attentional blink (AB) has been widely studied to probe the temporal capacity of attention for detecting visual targets. However, with the typical procedure of AB experiments, it is not possible to examine how the processing of non-target items in RSVP may be affected by attention. This paper describes a novel dual task procedure combined with RSVP to test effects of AB for nontargets at varied stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). In an exemplar experiment, a target category was first displayed, followed by a sequence of 8 nouns. If one of the nouns belonged to the target category, participants would respond &#8216;yes&#8217; at the end of the sequence, otherwise participants would respond &#8216;no&#8217;. Two 2-alternative forced choice memory tasks followed the response to determine if participants remembered the words immediately before or after the target, as well as a random word from another part of the sequence. In a second exemplar experiment, the same design was used, except that 1) the memory task was counterbalanced into two groups with SOAs of either 120 or 240 msec and 2) three memory tasks followed the sequence and tested remembrance for nontarget nouns in the sequence that could be anywhere from 3 items prior the target noun position to 3 items following the target noun position. Representative results from a previously published study demonstrate that our procedure can be used to examine divergent effects of attention that not only enhance targets but also suppress nontargets. Here we show results from a representative participant that replicated the previous finding.&#160;

For experiment 1, the representative subject&#8217;s accuracy for detecting a noun in the target category over SOAs was 72% at 120 msec, 91% at 240 msec, and 94% for 360 msec. For the memory task, only correctly answered trials of the target detection task were used, and trials were separated based on the presence or absence of a categorical target noun and then split into subsets based on their positions corresponding to the target noun, or their serial positions corresponding to the decoy target noun in target absent t...

Watch this Scientific Journal Video about A Dual Task Procedure Combined with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to Test Attentional Blink for Nontargets at JoVE.com

A Dual Task Procedure Combined with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to Test Attentional Blink for Nontargets

This paper describes a novel dual task procedure combined with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to look at attentional blink at varied stimulus onset asynchronies. This experimental procedure differed from others in that it tested attentional blink for nontargets.

When viewers search for targets in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream, if two targets are presented within about 500 msec of each other, the ...

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