The Influence Of Statistical Regularity On The Visual Attentional Suppression Effect Of College Students

With the development of comprehensive strength in all aspects of our country,higher education has gradually entered a new journey of popularization.In the research of higher education,college students are always the main subjects.After completing general education in junior and senior high schools,college students start learning professional education in different disciplines.Whether general education or professional education,these learning processes are carried out under a state of attention.Therefore,studying the attention patterns and characteristics of college students is of great significance for improving learning efficiency and expanding the research scope of psychology in higher education.In the process of carrying out learning activities,students not only need to focus on the learning content but also need to shield the interference from task-irrelevant information.A large number of studies using visual search tasks had found that in addition to top-down attentional control that affects the selection process,task-independent salient stimuli will also automatically capture attention in a bottom-up manner.Recently,some researchers have pointed out that in a specific task,participants can suppress the processing of task-independent salient stimuli to further improve search efficiency.In these studies,the presentation of task-independent salient stimuli not only did not produce the loss of response time but also produced the response time gains by inhibiting its processing,which is called the "attentional suppression effect".Although recent studies have discovered the existence of the attentional suppression effect,the mechanism and influencing factors are still insufficiently understood.Based on the traditional dichotomy theory of attentional capture,Awh et al.(2012)proposed a priority map view.They believe that in addition to current goals and physical salience that can affect attention,the implicit statistical regularity(statistical regularity refers to the regular information presented by the implicit stimulus in an experimental task)is also a vital influencing factor.The study contains three studies,ten eye-tracking experiments in all.Based on previous studies,college students are used as participants to investigate the mechanism of attentional suppression effect and the influence of statistical regularities on it.Study 1 was to optimize the variant of the additional singleton paradigm.Experiment 1 matched the stimulus size on the basis of previous research,excluding the influence of the salience difference caused by the stimulus size on the results.Experiment 2 further randomized the preparation time before presented the search sequence,which eliminates the influence of response setting,and determined appropriate parameters for subsequent experiments.The results showed that in the trials containing color singleton,the participants’ reaction time was significantly faster,and the first saccade destination was significantly less directed to the color singleton.The results showed that after the participants have mastered the feature information of the color singleton,they could suppress the processing of the color singleton in a top-down manner,prevent the occurrence of attentional capture,and improved search efficiency.In addition,Study 1 also found that when the preparation time was random,the attentional suppression effect was different under different preparation time conditions.The attentional suppression effect was greater when the preparation time before the search sequence was shorter.Study 2 was based on the experimental paradigm of Study 1.We manipulated the statistical regularity of the target to investigate whether statistical regularity could affect the attentional suppression effect.Study 2 focused on the statistical regularity based on the target,which separately manipulated the statistical regularities based on the position and feature of the target,and the complex statistical regularity that combined those two dimensions.The results showed that the statistical regularities based on the location and feature of the target could affect the attentional suppression effect.When the target presented at the high probability location,the attentional suppression effect was significantly greater.When the target was randomly presented with multiple colors with equal probability,the participants could not suppress the processing of the color singleton.However,when the target has a high probability feature,a significant attentional suppression effect appeared.The results indicated that the attentional suppression effect is not only based on the color singleton feature but also plays an important role in the target feature.It is worth noting that participants can implicitly learn complex statistical regularity based on the target,which will affect the attention selection.When the target was a high-probability color,whether it is presented in a high-probability location or a low-probability location,the participants could suppress the color singleton to capture attention,and the attentional suppression effect was produced.However,when the target was a low-probability color,the attentional suppression effect could only be generated when the target presented at a high-probability location.To a certain extent,it showed that in the mechanism of attentional suppression effect,the statistical regularity based on the target position and the statistical regularity based on the target feature could interact and jointly affect the attentional suppression effect.Study 3 was also based on the experimental paradigm of Study 1.We manipulated the statistical regularities based on the location and feature of the color singleton,and the two dimensions were combined to form a complex statistical regularity.The results showed that when the color singleton presented at a high-probability location or a high-probability feature,the participants’ response was significantly faster.It indicated that the influence of statistical regularity on attention is not limited to the target,and the statistical regularity of color singleton would also affect the magnitude of the attentional suppression effect.It is worth noting that complex statistical regularity based on color singleton can also be learned implicitly by participants.When the color singleton presented in a high-probability feature,there was a significant attentional suppression effect whether the color singletons appeared in the high-probability location or the low-probability location.When the color singleton presented in low-probability feature,even if the participants have the specific information about color singleton,they still could not suppress the color singleton.The results showed that the statistical regularity based on the location and the feature of the color singleton can work together on the suppression process.In summary,based on the optimization of the experimental paradigm related to the visual attentional suppression effect,the study investigated the influence of the statistical regularity on the visual attention suppression effect.The results showed that:(1)statistical regularities based on the location and feature of the target could have an impact on the visual attentional suppression effect in both behavioral response and eye movement,and the statistical regularity based on location and feature could work together on the suppression process of the color singleton;(2)statistical regularities based on the location and feature of color singleton and the complex statistical regularity that combined those two dimensions could also have an impact on the visual attentional suppression effect;(3)the generation of the visual attentional suppression effect was not only related to the predictability of the specific feature of the color singleton,but also related to the target feature.In summary,the study systematically investigated the influence of statistical regularity on the effect of visual attentional suppression,which provides important empirical evidence for exploring the mechanism of this effect.In this study,college students were used as participants.The visual search task was used to investigate the ability of college students to suppress the task-independent color singleton.The results found that the attention ability of college students was flexibly adjustable in different tasks,and could be well-adjusted under the influence of certain statistical regularity.This study will help to further reveal the law of attention of college students,and this study also provides empirical support to solve the attention-related problems in the process of higher education and promotes the development of educational neuroscience.