title: Evaluative pressure overcomes perceptual load effects.
abstract: Perceptual load has been found to be a powerful bottom-up determinant of distractibility, with high perceptual load preventing distraction by any irrelevant information. However, when under evaluative pressure, individuals exert top-down attentional control by giving greater weight to task-relevant features, making them more distractible from task-relevant distractors. One study tested whether the top-down modulation of attention under evaluative pressure overcomes the beneficial bottom-up effect of high perceptual load on distraction. Using a response-competition task, we replicated previous findings that high levels of perceptual load suppress task-relevant distractor response interference, but only for participants in a control condition. Participants under evaluative pressure (i.e., who believed their intelligence was assessed) showed interference from task-relevant distractor at all levels of perceptual load. This research challenges the assumptions of the perceptual load theory and sheds light on a neglected determinant of distractibility: the self-relevance of the performance situation in which attentional control is solicited.
authors.affiliation: Centre de Recherche Sur la Cognition et l'Apprentissage (CeRCA UMR 7295), Université de Poitiers and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 5 Rue Théodore Lefebvre, Poitiers, 86000, France, ae.normand@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Alice
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Normand
authors.forename: Frédérique
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Autin
authors.forename: Jean-Claude
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Croizet
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D056344:Executive Function / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D012718:Set, Psychology; D055815:Young Adult