title: Top-Down Processes Override Bottom-Up Interference in the Flanker Task.
abstract: Distractor interference in the flanker task is commonly viewed as an outcome of unintentional, involuntary processing, a by-product of attention-controlled processing of the target. An important implication of this notion is that the distractors are not subjected to top-down processing of their own. We tested this idea in a modified version of the flanker task, in which letter targets (S or O) were sometimes flanked by ambiguous distractors (a character that could be S or 5 or one that could be O or 0). Distractor interference was dependent on participants' expectations regarding the category of the distractors (i.e., letters or digits). For example, the O-0 distractor interfered with responding to S when it was perceived as a letter, but not when it was perceived as a digit. Hence, participants applied top-down processing to the peripheral distractors independently of the top-down processing applied to the targets. The fact that to-be-ignored peripheral distractors were processed to such a high level raises questions regarding the fundamental differences between target and distractor processing, and the quality of attentional filtering.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychological Sciences, Tel Aviv University rotemav1@post.tau.ac.il.
authors.forename: Rotem
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Avital-Cohen
authors.affiliation: School of Psychological Sciences, Tel Aviv University.
authors.forename: Yehoshua
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Tsal
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology*; D011932:Reading; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: cognitive control; flanker task; selective attention; top-down effects; visual attention; visual perception