POSTPERCEPTUAL LOCUS OF SUPPRESSION 1657color and then report as many additional items from thearray as possible. They found that the observers wereimpaired at reporting items that were far from the targetlocation compared with items that were adjacent to the target(for related findings, see Chelazzi, Miller, Duncan, &Desimone, 1993; Kim & Cave, 1995; Luck, Fan, & Hillyard,1993). This parallels the typical attentional blink pattern, inwhich T2 is reported accurately when it immediately followsT1 but is missed when it is temporally more distant.Performance eventually recovers after the attentional blink,whereas no recovery is observed at larger distances in visualsearch. However, this difference probably reflects the factthat attention is eventually withdrawn from T1 in the RSVPparadigm; visual search performance would similarly beexpected to recover once attention was withdrawn from thetarget.Although the RSVP task is analogous to the visual searchtask and the attentional blink phenomenon in the RSVP taskis analogous to the suppression of distractor items in thevisual search task, there is good reason to believe that theunderlying attentional mechanisms are not entirely identical.Specifically, whereas attentional selection in spatial atten-tion paradigms appears to begin at an early stage, beforestimulus identification is complete, it appears that theattentional blink reflects a postperceptual attentional mecha-nism that operates at the stage of working memory. In thefollowing sections we discuss the research that supportsthese proposals.An Early Locus of Space-Based SelectionTheories of attention have generally been divided be-tween
early-selection theories,
which propose that attentioninfluences perceptual processes, and
late-selection theories,
which propose that attention operates only after percep-tion is complete. The terms
early and late
have beenconstrued in a variety of ways, but the most fundamentaldistinction is whether attentional selection occurs before orafter a stimulus has been fully identified (for particularlyclear statements of this distinction, see Duncan, 1980;Duncan & Humphreys, 1989). In this article, we also use theterms
perceptual and postperceptual
to refer to this samedistinction. 1There is little debate about whether attention can some-times operate at a late, postperceptual stage. For example,there are many situations in which an observer will identify astimulus but choose not to make a response to it, which isclearly a case of postperceptual selective processing. Theprimary focus of the locus-of-selection debate has thus beenthe question of whether attention sometimes operates at anearly stage, before perception is complete. Despite decadesof research, however, the traditional behavioral techniquesof cognitive psychology have been unable to firmly deter-mine whether early selection is possible. The primarydifficulty is that these techniques rely on measurements ofbehavioral output, which reflects the combined effects ofearly and late processes. This makes it difficult to determinewith certainty the stage of processing that is influenced by agiven experimental manipulation. Consider, for example,the Eriksen flanker paradigm, in which to-be-ignored distrac-tor items are found to interfere with the processing of ato-be-attended target item (see C. W. Eriksen, 1995). Whensuch interference is found, it is often used as evidence thatthe distractors are fully identified and that selection thereforeoccurs at a postperceptual stage (e.g., B. A. Eriksen &Eriksen, 1974; Hagenaar & van der Heijden, 1986). How-ever, the observed interference could just as easily reflect aperceptual-level selection mechanism that only partially orprobabilistically attenuates the distractors (see Treisman,1964). Similarly, when no interference is observed, thisresult is often used to argue for early selection (e.g.,Francolini & Egeth, 1980; Lavie, 1995; Yantis & Johnston,1990). However, if the interference normally arises at thestage of response selection, it could easily be eliminated byan attentional mechanism that operates at a stage that isinterposed between stimulus identification and responseselection (see Allport, Tipper, & Chmiel, 1985; Driver &Tipper, 1989). Thus, neither the presence nor the absence ofinterference from distractors can unambiguously be used todetermine the locus of selection.To avoid ambiguities of this nature, several attentionresearchers have turned to event-related potential (ERP)recordings, which provide a continuous measure of process-ing between a stimulus and a response and can therefore beused to pinpoint the time at which attention begins toinfluence processing. ERPs are scalp-recorded voltage fluc-tuations that reflect synchronous neuronal activity associ-ated with sensory, motor, or cognitive events (for reviews,see Donchin, Karis, Bashore, Coles, & Gratton, 1986;Hillyard & Picton, 1987). As shown in Figure 1, the ERPwaveform is composed of several negative and positivevoltage fluctuations that are triggered by an event such as avisual stimulus. The peaks and valleys of the waveform arecalled
waves
or
components
and reflect the temporal progres-sion of processing, beginning with sensory activity andprogressing through higher level cognitive processes andresponse-related processes. Each ERP component is typi-caUy named according to its polarity and temporal positionwithin the overall ERP waveform (e.g.,
P2
for the secondpositive component, or
P215
to indicate a precise peak1This division of cognitive processing into perceptual andpostperceptual stages is crude because it cannot easily accommo-date factors such as top-down influences on perception and the useof partial information by decision and response processes. Simi-larly, given the possibility that a stimulus may be reinterpreted afterfurther information has been acquired, there may never be aspecific time at which a stimulus has been "fully identified."However, these difficulties can be minimized by defining the terms
perceptual and postperceptual
in a task-specific manner. Specifi-cally, the
completion of perception
can be defined as the point atwhich the observer has extracted the stimulus attributes that are tobe reported for the specific task being performed. According to thisdefinition, a picture of a red spoon would be considered fullyidentified in a color discrimination task as soon as its color wasexplicitly represented, but this same picture would not be consid-ered fully identified until its name became available in a namingtask or until its membership in the silverware category wasdetermined in a categorization task.
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