The Impact Of Selection History On Target Template Retention

Attention is important and ubiquitous in our daily lives,and attentional choice is often influenced by many different factors.Many studies have shown that the characteristics of the attentional object,the nature and demands of the attentional activity,and the individual’s knowledge and experience all have an impact on attentional choice(breadth,stability,allocation,and transfer of attention,etc.).Early in the study,researchers broadly divided attentional selection into two types,namely,attentional selection based on task goals(top-down processing)and physical salience(bottom-up processing).And in recent years,Theeuwes et al.have proposed that selection history also has an effect on our attention.Selection history includes Priming,Reward-driven,and Statistical learning.In previous studies,researchers have explored the effect of statistical learning in selection history on attention allocation and found that the more frequently the target stimulus appeared,the faster the reaction time would be,but when such a high and low probability target template was changed,when a permutation of the probabilities of the two target colors appeared(the original high probability color became a low probability color and the low probability color became a high probability color)Attention also shifted very quickly and flexibly,showing the same frequency effect in response time,and there was a significant change in response time in the first group after the target template shift,suggesting that people adapted quickly and flexibly to the target template change.Fast and flexible means that we do not keep the acquired target template in our mind.To address the issue of target template retention,which has not been discussed in previous research,this study sought to explore the effect of two components of choice history,statistical learning and value-driven,on target template retention and how the time course of the target template changes if it is retained.Experiment 1 investigates the effect of statistical learning on the retention of target templates,and builds on previous experiments by adding a new phase of recreating target templates with high and low probability of occurrence(75%probability of occurrence for target color one and 25% probability of occurrence for target color two).And another condition was set as a control.Under the control condition,the probability of two target colors appearing in the first two stages was equal,and the target template with high and low probability appeared for the first time in the third stage.It was found that when comparing the response to the high probability target color in the third stage for both conditions,the condition in which the high and low probability target template appeared again was significantly faster than the first appearance of the high and low probability target template.However,since there was no significant difference in the accuracy between the different conditions,this study only focused on the difference in response time.The results suggest that people keep the target template in their mind even when it is not used in the stage,and after when it appears again,it can be activated quickly.Experiment 2 investigated the effect of value-driven on goal template retention,we first conducted three phases of group adjustment,and we used all five groups as a phase in the conclusions drawn in Experiment 1,with different goal templates for different phases.Since previous studies and experiment I of this study have demonstrated that our attention changes quickly when the target template changes.So if a target template appears in fewer groups and is separated by other target templates for a longer period of time,can we still end up with the same conclusion? Therefore,in this study,the number of groups in three stages of two conditions was modified to two groups,six groups and two groups.In addition,the influence of reward-driven on the retention of target template in the selection history was further studied,and the target template was set as a high-low reward template(plus ten points for correct target color 1 responses and plus one point for correct target color 2 responses).In the first and third stages of condition 1,the high-low reward target template was used,and the second stage was the equiprobable target template.In condition 2,the third stage adopts the high-low reward target template,and the first and second stage are the equiprobable target template.It was found that even when the high-low reward target template was only briefly present in two groups,people responded significantly faster when they met the target template again than when they met it for the first time.This suggests that our learning and retention of target templates is both rapid and flexible.In Experiment 3,based on Experiment 1,this study further explores the time course of people’s retention of the high and low probability target template.Therefore,three different time intervals between the three phases were set for the study,twenty minutes,one hour,and one day intervals.The result shows that the advantage of re-learning the high-low probability target template is very significant at the interval of 20 minutes,while the advantage disappears slightly at the interval of one hour,but it still has some advantage.After a day’s gap,this advantage disappears completely.Therefore,the target template can be maintained,but with the passage of time,the effect of the retention will be greatly weakened and even eventually disappear.In summary,different factors in the selection history can play a role in the retention of the target templates,but they are not very durable in terms of time course.