The Effect Of Salience Of A Distractor On Visual Attention Capture

Attention capture is the most common task in our daily life.Previous studies have found that the efficiency of attention capture is affected by the distractor,but there is no more detailed analysis in this area.In contrast,our study discusses this problem by changing the salience and distance between distractor and target.In this study,we record and analyze the reaction time(RT),accuracy(ACC)and event related potentials(ERPs)of target capturing attention task with the presence of distractor by using behavior and EEG combined.And we try to explain the influence of a distractor on target capturing attention from different perspectives.Our experimental results show that:(1)The presence of the distractor does affect the efficiency of target capturing attention,which is reflected in longer RT and lower ACC.(2)The salience of the distractor will significantly affect attention capture to target,which may be related to selective attention and distractor suppression.(3)The spatial position of objects has an impact on attention capture.The result of a target in the middle line is different from that of a distractor in the middle line.When the target and the distractor are not located in the middle line,attention capture is related to the salience between distractor and target.(4)The distance between target and distractor will affect attention capture.When the target and the distractor are in the same field of vision,the presence of the distractor promotes the attention capture to target.(5)The results of time-space analysis and frequency domain analysis of EEG data show that the distractor captures attention through collaborative information interaction(bottom-up feed-forward and top-down feedback)between low-level and high-level brain regions.To sum up,our study discusses the effects of distractor saliency and the relative position between distractor and target on target capturing attention.Our results show that these effects are achieved by both bottom-up and top-down neural information interaction.And these results are of not only scientific significance for understanding the mechanism of attention,but also guiding meaning for patients with attention deficit to develop appropriate treatment.