title: Stimulus-driven or autonomous shift or attention?
abstract: Hsieh and Allport studied shifts of attention in semantic space, using a semantic monitoring task based on rapid, serial, visually presented sequences of words. They reported that following a shift of criterion, accuracy of semantic monitoring dropped abruptly to a low level, then gradually recovered to reach the preshift level over successive stimuli in the sequence. They further examined the nature of the recovery of accuracy following a shift of criterion. Despite the striking results they obtained, some problems of their design remained. Hence, the current research replicated Hsieh and Allport's experiments with some modifications and showed that a shift of semantic criterion in a rapidly presented sequence indeed appears to be stimulus-driven rather than an autonomous process.
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001143:Arousal; D001288:Attention; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011930:Reaction Time; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012660:Semantics; D012691:Serial Learning