@article{ref1,
title="Distractor probability changes the shape of the attentional template",
journal="Journal of experimental psychology: human perception and performance",
year="2017",
author="Geng, Joy J. and DiQuattro, Nicholas E. and Helm, Jonathan",
volume="43",
number="12",
pages="1993-2007",
abstract="Theories of attention commonly refer to the &quot;attentional template&quot; as the collection of features in working memory that represent the target of visual search. Many models of attention assume that the template contains a veridical representation of target features, but recent studies have shown that the target representation is &quot;shifted&quot; away from distractor features in order to optimize their distinctiveness and facilitate visual search. Here, we manipulated the probability of target-similar distractors during a visual search task in 2 groups, and separately measured the contents of the attentional template. We hypothesized that having a high probability of target-similar distractors would increase pressure to shift and/or sharpen the target representation in order to increase the distinctiveness of targets from distractors. We found that the high-similarity group experienced less distractor interference during visual search, but only for highly target-similar distractors. Additionally, while both groups shifted the target representation away from the actual target color, the high-similarity group also had a sharper representation of the target color. We conclude that the contents of the attentional template in working memory can be flexibly adjusted with multiple mechanisms to increase target-to-distractor distinctiveness and optimize attentional selection. (PsycINFO Database Record<br><br>(c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0096-1523",
doi="10.1037/xhp0000430",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000430"
}