The effects of practice on mechanisms of attention

Abstract

It is an open issue whether many of the effects observed in studies of selective attention are stable over extended periods of practice. Subjects are often placed in novel situations, and data is collected for 30–60 min. The results of such experiments are important, of course, because they determine models of attention. We examined three effects over 4 days: distractor interference, negative priming, and a form of response inhibition. The first two effects did not interact with practice, which suggests that the underlying mechanisms, such as inhibition of distractors, were stable. Conversely, the response inhibition effect did change with practice, but we suggest that the proportion of cued to uncued trials used in this study enabled conscious strategies to override the usual automatic inhibitory effects. © 1992, Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.