task attention facilitates learning of task-irrelevant stimuli任务注意力促进学习task-irrelevant刺激.pdf

Task Attention Facilitates Learning of Task-Irrelevant Stimuli Tsung-Ren Huang*, Takeo Watanabe Department of Psychology, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America Abstract Attention plays a fundamental role in visual learning and memory. One highly established principle of visual attention is that the harder a central task is, the more attentional resources are used to perform the task and the smaller amount of attention is allocated to peripheral processing because of limited attention capacity. Here we show that this principle holds true in a dual-task setting but not in a paradigm of task-irrelevant perceptual learning. In Experiment 1, eight participants were asked to identify either bright or dim number targets at the screen center and to remember concurrently presented scene backgrounds. Their recognition performances for scenes paired with dim/hard targets were worse than those for scenes paired with bright/easy targets. In Experiment 2, eight participants were asked to identify either bright or dim letter targets at the screen center while a task-irrelevant coherent motion was concurrently presented in the background. After five days of training on letter identification, participants improved their motion sensitivity to the direction paired with hard/dim targets improved but not to the direction paired with easy/bright targets. Taken together, these results suggest that task- irrelevant stimuli are not subject to the attentional control mechanisms that task-relevant stimuli abide. Citation: Huang T-R, Watanabe T (2012) Task Attention Facilitates Learning of Task-Irrelevant Stimuli. PLoS ONE 7(4): e35946. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0035946 Editor: Satoru Suzuki, Northwestern University, United States of America Received January 24, 2012; Accepted March 24, 2012; Published April 26, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Huang, Wa