The Attentional Disengagement Effect Based On Relevant Features In Visual Search:Evidence From Eye Movements

In visual search tasks,the distractors similar to the target can attract our attention and affect the speed of attentional disengagement.Previous studies mainly focused on the attentional disengagement of one feature dimension.However,the mechanisms of different feature dimensions on attentional disengagement in single and conjunction visual search remain unclear.In current study,we adopted the oculomotor disengagement paradigm and used saccade latency as an indicator to explore the effects of different feature dimensions of center stimuli on attentional disengagement.In Experiment 1A,we found that the attentional disengagement was significantly delayed when center stimuli shared color feature with the target,but not in shape feature.The results of experiment 1B were similar to those of experiment 1A.Moreover,we found that the difference between the two feature dimensions might be caused by their different search difficulty(Experiment 1C).Therefore,in Study 2,we matched the difficulty of searching for color and shape tasks before exploring whether there were differences in the effects of different feature dimensions on attentional disengagement.However,the results in Study 2 were similar to those in Experiment 1A,indicating that the different effects of feature dimensions on attentional disengagement were caused by the feature asymmetry.Therefore,in Study 3,presented the shapes of the matching phase and the formal experimental phase by adding a black outline to the outer edge of the shape to explore whether there is feature asymmetry that leads to different effects of different feature dimensions on attentional disengagement.The results showed that although the attentional disengagement was delayed in shape dimension,it was still smaller than that in color dimension,which proved the existence of feature asymmetry.By series of experiments,we found that the attentional disengagement was significantly delayed when center stimuli shared features with the target and significantly accelerated when it shared color features with the salient distractor,and the disengagement effect is associated with task difficulty and asymmetry of features.Our results supported that goal-oriented attention sets were the main cause of delayed attentional disengagement.We found that participants not only had target attention sets but also rejected attention sets.