The influence of distracter and target features on distracter induced blindness

Lars Michael, Markus Kiefer, Michael Niedeggen
2012 Advances in Cognitive Psychology  
distracter induced blindness, task set inhibition, selective attention the inhibitory effect of the processing of target-like distracters has already been shown to affect the conscious detection of simple motion and simple orientation stimuli in a random dot kinematogram. in two experiments we examined the effects of single-feature motion distracters, single-feature orientation distracters, and combined-feature distracters containing both motion and orientation information. the target was
more » ... ied as a coherent motion episode (experiment 1) or as a combined-feature episode where the coherent motion was accompanied by an abrupt change in line orientation (experiment 2). results showed that (a) the respective featurespecific inhibitory processes operate separately even when the distracter features are presented simultaneously and (b) both inhibitory processes contribute to the blindness effect when the conjunction of two features is defined as the target. Again, this inhibitory-process is feature-specific: only features that are defined in the task are represented in the inhibitory task set. in case of combined-feature task-sets, these representations remain separate, so that combined-feature distracters as well as single-feature distracters are able to induce blindness effects. corresponding author: lars Michael, AbstrAct Keywords
doi:10.5709/acp-0103-3 fatcat:s2wgfqleqff6zg4gtdjbypdtcq