Journal
PERCEPTION & PSYCHOPHYSICS
Volume 70, Issue 6, Pages 1130-1137Publisher
PSYCHONOMIC SOC INC
DOI: 10.3758/PP.70.6.1130
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Lavie (1995) proposed a load account of selective attention, which holds that spare capacity is involuntarily allocated to the processing of irrelevant stimuli. In support of this account, Lavie and Cox (1997) combined a letter search task with a flanker task and found that increasing load (search set size) resulted in decreased interference from an irrelevant distractor letter. In three experiments using a very similar procedure, we varied distractor location and distractor distinctiveness and observed that as load increased (from set size 2 to set size 6), there was a consistent reduction in interference. Critically, we addressed a fundamental hypothesis derived from the load account-that practice reduces capacity demands. This hypothesis leads to the rather counterintuitive prediction that as performance improves with practice, distractor processing should actually increase. Indeed, we found that interference in a high-load condition (set size 6), but not in a low-load condition (set size 2), did increase with practice. We describe a two-stage dilution account of attention that accommodates these results.
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