O Papel da Informação Semântica na Atenção Seletiva: o uso de dicas endógenas como textura em uma tarefa de busca visual

Abstract

Overall, the initial researches about selective attention showed a great focus on the study of low-level and mid-level of information process. Though, there are an increasing number of studies about of high-level information influence on the selection using realistic and complex scenes. This work aims to study the semantic information in visual search. However, unlike others in the field, the method use simple physical stimulus. In the experiments, a set of arrows parallel oriented and pointed to the same direction was used as a semantic element, the hypothesis was that if the semantic information guide the attention, the search would be more efficient when the direction of the arrows were congruent with the hemifield of the target location. In experiment 1, the results showed that when the texture luminance is distinct of relevant elements, semantic information does not influence the search. In experiment 2, the congruency of texture with the target was manipulated so that in 80% of the proofs the arrows indicate the hemifield of the target location. However, the results again showed that semantic information does not influence the search. Finally, in experiment 3, activation of the texture was manipulated by a priming generated by a previous search. The results suggest that prriming of the textures feautures slowed the search, but there was no significant effect of the semantic information. Thus, was concluded that the semantic information does not influence the selection when used simple physical stimuli, being discarded when it has low similarity with the relevant stimuli.