Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 4, 2025
Using Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to Measure Set-Specific Capture, a Consequence of Distraction While Multitasking
Published on: August 29, 2018
Electrophysiological and behavioral evidence for the attention capture and suppression failure of irrelevant
Cenlou Hu1, Jintao Song2, Yan Hong2
1Department of Radiology, The Affiliated Drum Tower Hospital, Medical School of Nanjing University, Nanjing, China; Department of Psychology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China; School of Education/The Key Laboratory for Juveniles Mental Health and Educational Neuroscience, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China; Key Laboratory of Child Development and Learning Science of Ministry of Education, School of Biological Sciences & Medical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China.
Abstract:
Attention bias (ABs) and inhibition deficits play crucial roles in the development, maintenance, and recurrence of test anxiety. However, whether test-anxious individuals will show ABs and inhibition deficits of general task-irrelevant stimuli in a complex visual display is unclear. Thus, we used the additional singleton task (AST) and recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) indices of attentional selection (the N2 posterior contralateral, N2pc), suppression (distractor positivity, PD), and maintenance of working memory (the sustained posterior contralateral negativity, SPCN) to explore this issue. Twenty-eight participants in the high test-anxious (HTA) group and twenty-eight participants in the low test-anxious (LTA) group attended the experiment and were required to search for a target and synchronously ignore a singleton distractor on some trials. Consequently, HTA and LTA individuals had poorer accuracies and longer response times in the distractor-present condition than in the distractor-absent condition. The HTA group got larger interferences from singleton distractors than the LTA group. Electrophysiological results revealed a distractor N2pc and SPCN in the HTA group. Moreover, target N2pc and SPCN in the HTA group were larger when the singleton distractor and target were on the same side than on the opposite side. These results indicated that HTA individuals were captured attention by singleton distractors and failed to expel them from working memory. Accordingly, the present findings extended previous work by providing direct evidence that test anxiety could increase the effects of stimulus-driven attention systems and impair the function of goal-directed attention systems.
