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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Aug 25, 2025

Brain Imaging Investigation of the Impairing Effect of Emotion on Cognition

Brain Imaging Investigation of the Impairing Effect of Emotion on Cognition

Published on: February 1, 2012

How do (perceptual) distracters distract?

Tsvetomira Dumbalska¹, Katarzyna Rudzka^2,3, Hannah E Smithson¹

¹Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.

Plos Computational Biology

|October 13, 2022

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Distracters influence choices by interacting with target stimuli, not independently. This consistency bias affects decision values, not sensory signals, and is independent of spatial attention.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Computational Neuroscience
Human Behaviour

Background:

Perceptual decisions are often made in the presence of distracting stimuli.
The precise mechanisms by which distracters impact decision-making remain incompletely understood.
Existing models propose either independent or interactive effects of distracters on choices.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how irrelevant distracters modulate human choices during perceptual tasks.
To contrast computational models explaining independent versus interaction effects of distracters.
To determine the locus and attentional dependence of any observed distracter effects.

Main Methods:

Human behavioral experiments measuring orientation judgments of target gratings.
Psychophysical reverse correlation to analyze decision strategies.
Computational modeling, comparing independent and interaction models of distracter influence.

Main Results:

Decisions were significantly more sensitive when target and distracter stimuli were consistent.
Evidence strongly supported an interaction model over an independent model.
A consistency bias was observed, operating on decision values, independent of spatial attention.

Conclusions:

Distracters interact with target information, biasing choices based on stimulus consistency.
This bias operates at the decision level, not solely on initial sensory processing.
A normalization framework explains how context (expectation and variability) influences perception.