engleski

Top-down and bottom-up attentional bias in change detection

Change detection is a very important and adaptive process of apprehending changes in the world that surrounds us. Although change detection is very pervasive in our everyday lives, phenomena such as change blindness show that people are quite limited in their ability to notice even large changes in visual scenes. This inability to detect changes can be demonstrated in both laboratory and real-world situations and can be related to both expected and unexpected changes, even to attended stimuli. The aim of this study was to explore the efficiency of change detection for stimuli that differently employ our attentional resources. We used a flicker paradigm in which participants had to detect changes in a stimulus set that contained both capturing and noncapturing elements which produced different bottom-up attentional bias. We also varied respondents’ main orientation to particular stimuli which produced different top- down attentional bias. Results indicate that both top-down and bottom-up attentional bias facilitates change detection to some extent. We will discuss the effects of joint congruent and incongruent top-down and bottom-up attentional bias on detection of changes to the displayed stimuli. The results will be interpreted in relation to our general understanding of visual awareness and attention mechanisms.

bottom-up attention; change detection; top-down attention

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