The Effect Of Response Competition On The Attentional Boost Effect

The Attentional Boost Effect refers to the memory enhancement phenomenon of background stimuli presented at the same time as the target detection stimulus when the secondary task requires target detection.Swallow believed that the effect stems from the trade-off between the interference effect of dual tasks and the facilitation effect of target detection.So,what factors influence this trade-off between "interference" and "facilitation" ? Previous studies found that,due to the increased competition for attention resources in dual-target detection,the interference effect would offset the facilitation effect,so the ABE phenomenon will disappeared if participants required to perform dual-target key-press response in detection tasks.Based on these,this study speculates that when dual-task attention resource competition occurs in the reaction execution phase of information processing,that is,different reaction executions lead to competition for attention resources(i.e.reaction competition),may lead to the increase of interference effects in information processing,and makes it exceed the promotion effect brought by target detection,thereby affecting the ABE.It is further speculated that if there is response competition between the dual tasks,it may reduce or even lead to the disappearance of the ABE.To this end,this study intends to verify this speculation through three experiments.Experiment 1 set up a button response between dual tasks to verify whether the response competition between dual tasks will affect ABE.The results showed that when both the memory task and the detection task need to key pressed,the ABE could not be generated in the subsequent test,which preliminarily verified the research hypothesis that response competition would have an impact on the attention-promoting effect.On the basis of experiment 1,the experiment 2 cancled the button response to the memory task to eliminate the additional interference caused by the same action,and the response execution mode of the memory task was further divided into external actions(oral reading)and internal actions(silent reading)to further explore whether the size of response competition caused by internal and external actions has different effects on the ABE.Based on previous two experiments,the third experiment 3 changed the encoding method from conceptual encoding to perceptual encoding,in order to explore whether there is a particular encoding method in the effect of response competition on ABE.The results showed that no matter in the processing of conceptual coding or perceptual coding,ABE disappeared in the oral reading condition with strong,while in the silent reading condition,there was a significant ABE in the subsequent test.Therefore,this study concludes that the resource competition is one of the factors affecting the trade-off between "interference" and "facilitation".And it is shown that its strength can regulate the generation of the ABE,and this effect is not limited by coding conditions.