Attentive Pop-Out: Spatial Asymmetries in a Visual Search Task A Albonico1, M Malaspina1, E Bricolo1, M Martelli2, R Daini1 |
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1Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy |
| In literature the existence of different kinds of popouts, the preattentive and attentive popouts, which reveal different attentional resources has been suggested (VanRullen et al., 2004, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16:1, 4-14). We aimed at investigating the existence of left-right asymmetries in visual search paradigm (Poynter et al., 2012, Laterality, 17(6), 711-726) in the case of attentive popout. We administered to 41 psychology students a detection task in which an “L” target stimulus, half-times displayed to the left side of the monitor and half-times to the right, could or could not be present. The number of distractors (“X” stimuli) was varied (2, 4,8 and 16) and presented in a random order. The results show the absence of the popout effect: reaction times increased with the number of distractors not only in the absence of the target, but also when it was present. Moreover, we found a different trend of RT increase in function of number of distractors depending on the target spatial position, i.e. in the left or right part of the screen. The results will be discussed in the light of the relationship between perception and attention. |
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