The Influence Of Expectation On Attention:The Difference Between Target Expectation And Distractor Expectation

The visual system is often in a complex environment,receiving a large amount of information.Although the brain’s processing ability is limited,it is able to filter and process the required information efficiently.According to previous researches,both expectation mechanism and attention mechanism play an important role in visual information processing.The prediction error is less when the expected output of the brain is consistent with the real world information input.In this case,the brain can complete information retrieval and recognition quickly.Attention can selectively process a large amount of information,so that the information processing becomes efficient.This research combines two hot topics in the field of cognition: the mechanism of expectation and the mechanism of attention,focusing on how they work together with visual information processing.Trying to define expectation and attention orthogonally in different spatial partitioning ways,and explores the relationship between different expectations(target expectation,distractor expectation)and exogenous attention in the process of visual information processing.In this research,the spatial bi-peripheral cue and visual search were combined to address this issue.In Experiment 1,we investigated how the two conditions affect the visual information processing when the expectation condition is distributed in upper and lower visual field and the attention condition is distributed in left and right visual field.Experiment 2 was a balance experiment,in which the expected condition was defined as the left and right visual filed,and the attention was defined as the upper and lower visual field,in an attempt to repeat the findings of experiment 1.On the basis of the results of Experiment 1 and Experiment 2,Experiment 3 explored the difference of the spatial distribution of attention condition in left and right visual field and in upper and lower visual field.Experiment 4 investigated the impact of task difficulty on the relationship between them.Experiment 5 used eye-tracking technology to repeat Experiment 1 under more strict control conditions.The findings are as follows:1.In Experiment 1,we verified that the relationship between expectation and attention is different when expectation is anchored to a target or a distractor.When expectation is anchored to a distractor,expectation and attention affect perception independently;however,when expectation is anchored to a target,expectation and attention affect perception in an interactive manner.2.In Experiment 2,it was observed that expectation and attention affected visual behavior in different ways when the expectation was anchored to the target and the distraction,but no significant attentional effect was found.3.Our conjecture was verified in Experiment 3,and it was difficult to have attentional effect when the bi-peripheral cues were presented simultaneously across the left and right visual hemispheres,and the results of Experiment 1 were successfully repeated in Experiment 3.4.Experiment 4 increased the task difficulty by increasing the number of stimulus items.We repeated the basic results of Experiment 1,and found that the difficulty of the task did not affect the relationship between attention and expectation through inter-experiment analysis.5.Experiment 5 used eye tracking technology to strictly repeat the behavioral results of Experiment 1,and through the fixation report,it was found that expectation and attention did not interact in the early fixation,but did interact in the later fixation.Based on the above results of five experiments,we can inferred that when expectation is anchored to different subjects,the relationship between expectation and attention is different.Specifically,when expectation is anchored to the distractor,they are independent,and when expectation is anchored to the target,they are interactive.