Abstract
Executive control of attention refers to processes that detect and resolve conflict among competing thoughts and actions. Despite the high-level nature of this faculty, the role of awareness in executive control of attention is not well understood. In this study, we used interocular suppression to mask the flankers in an arrow flanker task, in which the flankers and the target arrow were presented simultaneously in order to elicit executive control of attention. Participants were unable to detect the flanker arrows or to reliably identify their direction when masked. There was a typical conflict effect (prolonged reaction time and increased error rate under flanker-target incongruent condition compared to congruent condition) when the flanker arrows were unmasked, while the conflict effect was absent when the flanker arrows were masked with interocular suppression. These results suggest that blocking awareness of competing stimuli with interocular suppression prevents the involvement of executive control of attention.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 1110 |
| Journal | Frontiers in Psychology |
| Volume | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 11 2015 |
Funding
We thank Dr. Julien Dubois for providing MATLAB code to generate the Mondrian images for the CFS mask, and Drs. Elizabeth Chua and Tony Ro for their helpful comments and suggestions. Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01 MH094305 to JF. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. YW was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2015CB351800).
Keywords
- conflict effect
- consciousness awareness
- continuous flash suppression
- executive control of attention
- flanker task
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Psychology