Developing an Individual Profile of Attentional Control Strategy

Irons, Jessica; Leber, Andrew B.

doi:10.1177/0963721420924018

Cited by 21 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…For example, individuals differ in the strategies they use when performing attention-demanding tasks. Some strategies are more effective than others, yet strategy choice is largely unrelated to individual differences in ability (Irons & Leber, 2020). We recommend that researchers collect multiple measures of constructs and perform latent variable analyses when possible to extract variance shared across tasks and reduce task-specific effects on overall estimates of ability.…”

Section: Domain General or Task Specific?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Attention Control: A Cornerstone of Higher-Order Cognition

Burgoyne

Engle

2020

Curr Dir Psychol Sci

105

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For years, psychologists have wondered why people who are highly skilled in one cognitive domain tend to be skilled in other cognitive domains, too. In this article, we explain how attention control provides a common thread among broad cognitive abilities, including fluid intelligence, working memory capacity, and sensory discrimination. Attention control allows us to pursue our goals despite distractions and temptations, to deviate from the habitual, and to keep information in mind amid a maelstrom of divergent thought. Highlighting results from our lab, we describe the role of attention control in information maintenance and disengagement and how these functions contribute to performance in a variety of complex cognitive tasks. We also describe a recent undertaking in which we developed new and improved attention-control tasks, which had higher reliabilities, stronger intercorrelations, and higher loadings on a common factor than traditional measures. From an applied perspective, these new attention-control tasks show great promise for use in personnel selection assessments. We close by outlining exciting avenues for future research.

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Section: Domain General or Task Specific?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Attention Control: A Cornerstone of Higher-Order Cognition

Burgoyne

Engle

2020

Curr Dir Psychol Sci

105

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“…Individuals performing this task have produced a striking range of different strategies, from near-perfect to below chance optimality, which is defined as the proportion of trials in which the optimal target is reported (Irons & Leber, 2016). Further research has shown that the variation in strategy is not explained by cognitive abilities, such as visual search speed, working memory capacity, fluid intelligence, standardized test scores, or grades (for a review, see Irons & Leber, 2020). Indeed, we have found that the vast majority of participants can use the optimal strategy when it is required of them; however, the degree to which individuals choose the optimal strategy when it is not required appears to depend on how subjectively effortful they find the optimal strategy to be (Irons & Leber, 2018a; experiment 2).…”

Section: The Adaptive Choice Visual Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Classical research has shown that individuals are able to control attention in a goal-directed manner to selectively bias processing to certain features (Folk et al, 1992; Green & Anderson, 1956). The efficiency with which observers find targets is not only dependent on their ability, but also on the strategy they choose to control their attention (Irons & Leber, 2020). That is, if the goal is to find apples in a grocery store, two individuals may have equivalent abilities to search for red objects and to search for round objects, but the one who chooses to search for red objects will achieve a faster result than the one who chooses to search for round objects.…”

Section: The Adaptive Choice Visual Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the generality of strategy optimization across distinct attentional tasks.

Li¹,

McKinney²,

Irons³

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Individuals vary substantially in the degree to which they optimize their performance in attentional tasks. How do such individual markers of attentional strategy relate across different tasks? Previous research has failed to observe significant correlations in strategy optimization between distinct visual search tasks (Clarke et al., 2022); suggesting that strategy optimization is not unitary, or determined by a single trait variable.Here we test whether strategy optimization shows some degree of generality, specifically across tasks with similar attentional components. We employed the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS; Irons & Leber, 2018a), a visual search paradigm designed to directly measure attentional control strategy. In 2 studies, we had participants complete the ACVS and a modified, but similar, task with 1 altered attentional component (specifically, the requirement to use feature-based attention and enumeration, respectively). We found positive correlations in strategy optimization between tasks that do versus do not involve feature-based attention (r = .38, p = .0068) and across tasks that do versus do not require enumeration (r = .33, p = .018). These results provide novel evidence for generality of strategy optimization, although the strength of the correlations was weaker than the within-task test-retest reliability of strategy measurements. Thus, while some generality exists, strategy optimization appears to be quite heterogeneous. Public Significance StatementPeople carry out visual search for objects of interest every day, and attentional strategy-how one voluntarily chooses to search-plays a key role in this essential human activity. Researchers have attempted to understand what drives some individuals to use more optimal strategies than others, but this pursuit has been complicated by a recent finding that the degree to which people chose optimal strategies in one task did not predict how optimal they were at other tasks. The present study investigated whether people's tendencies to optimize performance can be similar across multiple tasks, provided that the tasks themselves are similar to one another. Results showed that people did indeed optimize to similar degrees across tasks that were similar to one another, but only weakly so. These results carry clear implications for research seeking to characterize how individuals use attentional strategy; specifically, strategy is unlikely to be explained by a unitary trait variable but rather a heterogeneous set of multiple variables. These variables remain unknown, and further work to identify and describe them is essential.

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“…Attention researchers have shown that frequent updating of one's control state comes with performance costs (e.g., Wolfe et al, 2004), and one can thus speculate that observers might want to avoid such costs when possible. Moreover, a growing number of studies have reported suboptimal use of attentional strategy when participants are able to choose how to perform a visual search task (for reviews, see Clarke et al, 2019;Irons & Leber, 2020). Irons and Leber (2018) produced evidence that participants avoid optimal strategies when such strategies are reported to be subjectively effortful.…”

Section: Why Would Our Participants Use Explicit Proactive Suppression?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding of attentional suppression is incomplete without consideration of motivation and context

Leber

2021

Visual Cognition

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provide a valuable status report on our collective understanding of attentional capture, and they succeed at identifying common ground and articulating persisting points of discord. Here, I contribute two points. First, while there is limited evidence individuals can explicitly and proactively suppress salient distractors, investigations into this question have not always considered participants' motivation and strategy use. Second, in evaluating how attentional suppression is guided by past experience, or selection history, one must consider the significant role of associative learning, which is revealed via context-dependent phenomena.

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Developing an Individual Profile of Attentional Control Strategy

Cited by 21 publications

References 42 publications

Attention Control: A Cornerstone of Higher-Order Cognition

Attention Control: A Cornerstone of Higher-Order Cognition

Assessing the generality of strategy optimization across distinct attentional tasks.

Understanding of attentional suppression is incomplete without consideration of motivation and context

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