Attentional intensity: Phasic alertness in visual perception
Final Report Abstract
Warning signals (“alerting cues”) support visual perception and action by speeding up reactions in visual choice tasks or by increasing the speed of visual processing for object recognition. Alerting cues provide no information about how to act. That they nevertheless improve behavioral performance has been explained as a result of phasic alertness, a temporary state of readiness for perception and action induced by the alerting cues. Traditionally, phasic alertness has been assumed to be elicited by bottom-up, stimulus-driven mechanisms that are triggered by the alerting cues and that increase. It is unclear, however, by what bottom-up and top-down mechanisms phasic alertness is governed. The first research line of this project provided a psychophysical characterization of visual and auditory alerting in a visual choice reaction task. Its results revealed that the two sensory modalities as bottom-up sources are equally effective in eliciting phasic alertness to support visually-guided action, once the intensities of alerting cues are controlled. The second research line investigated how top-down task-driven mechanisms for controlling behavior impact on the improvements of perception and action due to phasic alertness. This research line assessed visual perception and visually-guided action in multiple experimental paradigms, using visual choice reaction tasks, visual search tasks, and tasks of visually-guided action sequences. The findings from this research line suggest that alerting proceeds independently from task-driven representations of stimulus informativeness that orient attention in space, and that alerting happens irrespective of the task complexity in visual search. The findings also uncovered that phasic alerting requires an expectation for alerting cues and that phasic alertness seem to interface with action control, so that the support of visually-guided action by alerting is limited to only the next action in a sequence. The third research line investigated how task-driven preparation of information processing and of the readiness for action affected phasic alertness. The findings from this research may suggest that phasic alertness is not only triggered by external events, but can also arise internally-driven, based on the urgency of impending actions. This form of phasic alertness has been found to open up a time-window in which action is dominated by stimulus-driven processing, leading to actions conflicting with current task-derived intentions. Taken together, the findings from this research project demonstrated that phasic alertness may be triggered bottom-up and stimulus-driven, but that there are multiple influences from top-down task-driven mechanisms determining how phasic alertness improves perception and action.
Publications
-
Is phasic alertness independent from top-down processing? Evidence from stimulus informativeness. Talk given at the European Conference on Visual Perception. (2021, online)
Dietze, N. & Poth, C. H.
-
Urgency forces stimulus-driven action by overcoming cognitive control. ELife, 10. CLOCKSS.
Poth, Christian H.
-
Bypassing cognitive control in urgent situations: The role of arousal. Talk given at the Conference of Experimental Psychologists (TEAP). (2022, online).
Poth, C. H.
-
Nijmegen, Netherlands. Phasic alerting effects on the Trail-Making-Test. Talk given at the European Conference on Visual Perception.
Dietze, N., Recker, L. & Poth, C. H.
-
Phasic Alertness is Unaffected by the Attentional Set for Orienting. Journal of Cognition, 5(1).
Dietze, Niklas & Poth, Christian H.
-
Vision and audition in phasic alertness. Talk given at the Conference of Experimental Psychologists (TEAP). (2022, online).
Dietze, N. & Poth, C. H.
-
Vision rivals audition in alerting humans for fast action. Acta Psychologica, 238, 103991.
Dietze, Niklas & Poth, Christian H.
-
Warning signals only support the first action in a sequence. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 8(1).
Dietze, Niklas; Recker, Lukas & Poth, Christian H.
-
Alerting effects require the absence of surprise. Acta Psychologica, 245, 104239.
Dietze, Niklas; Horstmann, Gernot & Poth, Christian H.
-
Phasic alerting in visual search tasks. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 86(3), 707-716.
Dietze, Niklas & Poth, Christian H.
