Refreshing Predictable Words
Do you think that your thoughts can influence how you see the world? As children, the shadows in our bedroom at night look like monsters (sometimes when we’re adults too 😬). Or sometimes we read a word, then go back to realize it was a totally different word! Or on occasion, we may even mis-identify a person, place, or object. In one particularly intriguing example, Dr. Johnson showed that when the thought of a particular picture or word was the focus of attention immediately before the same word was presented, reaction times were slower than when a different picture or word was presented. In the paper describing these findings ( Johnson et al., 2013 - Foraging for Thought), Johnson et al. likened this outcome to a perceptual phenomena known as Inhibition of Return (IoR). The IoR effect is described as a deliberate delay in the return of attention to an item that was just previously the focus of attention. The IoR effect is often thought of as a mechanism of attention that is meant encourage the perceiver to build and maintain awareness of their surroundings by surveying the environment, rather than remaining hyper-focused on one item location in space. The findings presented in the Foraging for Thought paper suggest that the mechanisms underlying the IoR effect might influnece attention on a global level, but to this date, almost all research has focused on the IoR effect while attention is focused externally.
My suspicion is that the mechanisms driving the IoR effect operate on a global scale, influencing attention that is focused externally (on sights and sounds) AND internally (on active thoughts). As such, we are currently working to probe the mechanisms underlying this phenomena by manipulating the probability that attention will be directed back to an item that was just the focus of internal attention (i.e., a thought brought up in working memory) immediately prior (a manipulation known to influence the traditional IoR effect). By exploring these effects, we will further our understanding of how internal and external attention systems interact, and how our thoughts influence our attention to items in the environment. In the future, we plan to expand on this line of research by incorporating different manipulations and collecting measurements of brain activity.
Collaborators
Status
The manuscript for this project is currently under review.
Pre Print
Cole, Z. J., Lintz, E. N., & Johnson, M. (2021, January 10). Probability manipulations can modulate but not reverse reflective inhibition-of-return effects. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/cs5q3
