A Dissociation Between Attention and Selection
通过两个空间线索实验，发现注意并不必然导致对刺激所有特征维度的加工，任务预期可限制加工深度，表明选择不仅涉及注意聚焦。
It is widely assumed that the allocatian of spatial attention results in the "selection" of attended objects or regions of space. That is, once a stimulus is attended, all its feature dimensions are processed irrespective of their relevance to behavioral goals. This assumption is based in part on experiments showing significant interference for attended stimuli when the response to an irrelevant dimension conflicts with the response to the relevant dimension (e.g., the Stroop effect). Here we show that such interference is not due to attending per se. In two spatial cuing experiments, we found that it was possible to restrict processing of attended stimuli to task-relevant dimensions. This new evidence supports two novel conclusions: (a) Selection involves more than the focusing of attention per se: and (b) task expectations play a key role in detertnining the depth of processing of the elementary feature dimensions of attended stimuli.