Can We Control The Perceptual Selection Or Not

Can we control the perceptual selection or not still is an opening question. The early selection approach, originally proposed by Broadbent, suggest that perception is a limited process that requires perceptual attention to proceed. And the perceptual selection base on the results of the rudimentary analysis of physical features. However the late selection approach advanced by Deutch and Deutch assumes that perception is an unlimited process, which can be performed in an automatic parallel fashion without need for selection. For instance, in the flanker task, also the target and the flankers always in the different position, the flankers still can interfere with the processing of the target. The perceptual load theory claim that the extent of processing of task irrelevant information (i.e., distractors) depends on the perceptual load of relevant information. When the perceptual load of relevant information is sufficiently high to demand all the available resources, then the distractor will not be perceived and the interference from distractors will be eliminated. In contrast, when perceptual load for relevant information doesn't exhaust the capacity of perception, the surplus capacity of perception will "spill over", and the distractor will be perceived resulting in interference from task irrelevant information (Lavie & Tsal,1994; Lavie,1995). Lavie and her colleagues also proposed the perceptual selection mechanism is a passive mechanism which means that in situations of low perception load, any capacity not taken up in perception of task-relevant stimuli would involuntarily'spill over'to the perception of task-irrelevant distractors. But we think the main reason why Lavie and her colleagues suggest that the perceptual selection mechanism is a passive mechanism is they basically just focused on the perceptual load, but ignored the motivation, expects and selection of processing style of the subjects.In our research, we designed four experiments to find out whether we can control the perceptual selection or not. In experiment 1 and 2, would subjects who are sensitive to the negative feedback or not sensitive have different size of interfere effects when they performed the flanker task (in experiment 1) and stroop task (in experiment 2) in which they would face negative feedback. The people who are sensitive to negative feedback may have higher motivation to improve their performance than the people who don't care about the negative feedback. We want to test whether the change of motivation can affect the perceptual selection of low perceptual load task. In the experiment 3, our purpose was to find out whether perceptual load of relevant stimuli would determine the processing of the irrelevant stimuli when the subjects didn't know that the irrelevant stimuli would appear in some trials (in 25 percent of all trials). In the experiment 4, we designed two conditions:in one condition the irrelevant stimuli and the target are same in most trials (75 percent), and in the other the irrelevant stimuli and the target are differen t in most trials (75 percent). We want to know whether the subjects chose different processing style according to the situation.The results of these experiments show that the perceptual selection was affects by the motivation, expect and the selection of processing of subjects. The results can be show as follow: first, the perceptual selection are not determined by the perceptual load of relevant stimuli, when the subjects who are sensitive to the negative feedback facing the negative feedback in the experiment try harder to control the interfere effect of the irrelevant stimuli in order to avoid to facing more negative feedback. Then the perceptual selection would appear in the condition of low perceptual load. Second, if the subjects have no idea that there are irrelevant stimuli in the experiment, the perceptual load of relevant stimuli would not influence the perception of the surprise stimuli. Third, subjects can chose the process styles based on the whether the irrelevant stimuli is useful or not, no matter the perceptual load of the relevant stimuli are high or low. If the irrelevant stimuli are useful to the processing of the target, subjects may choice the global processing style, however if the irrelevant stimuli are harmful to the processing of the target, subjects may choice the local processing style. The selection of the processing style means that we can perform the perceptual selection. Fourth, we don't agree that the allocation of the perceptual resource ruled by the lower limit.