An Attentional Serial Reaction Time Task
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Date
2024-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
The brain has the ability to filter and prioritize a cacophony of often extraneous visual stimuli via a mechanism called attention. Traditionally, attention is thought to be guided by either a goal-driven mechanism (top-down, supported by fronto-parietal brain networks) or a stimulus-driven mechanism (bottom-up, supported by visual networks). However, recent work has highlighted a type of attention that does not fit within this dichotomy: one driven by prior experience (i.e., selection history) that can be characterized as a habit, inflexible, insensitive to outcome devaluation, and automatic. Serial reaction time studies have demonstrated these properties; however, this type of task relies largely on motor learning. Contextual cueing studies have also displayed the learning of associations between responses and contexts, however these fail to display the effect on an individual level. For the present study, we developed a behavioral task with spatial-temporal demands to probe habit-like attention. Participants were tasked with making decisions about stimuli that appeared in blocks alternating between learned and novel locations. We implemented an altered version of the sequence to test the perseveration of the attentional habit in which participants completed a shorter version of the main task, but the last location of the learned sequence was changed. Finally, we assessed participants’ knowledge of the learned sequence with a short post-test that asked them to predict the next location of the image in the sequence. Our results indicated strong significant reaction time and accuracy effects for the learned compared to the random sequence, supporting the idea of sequentially guided attention. Participants appeared to possess explicit knowledge of the learned sequence, challenging the inclusion of implicitness as a criterion for attentional habits. The altered sequence demonstrated a significant difference in reaction time between critical and non-critical trials. However, this was not the case for accuracy. Future directions include the implementation of the task using a more complex learned sequence and a more highly powered reversal task.
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Keywords
attention, cognition, psychology, serial reaction time