. (2015) 'Altering attentional control settings causes persistent biases of visual attention.', The quarterly journal of experimental psychology., 69 (1). pp.
129-149.Further information on publisher's website:https://doi.org/10. 1080/17470218.2015.1031144 Publisher's copyright statement:This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor Francis in the quarterly journal of experimental psychology. on 13/05/2015 available online:http://www.tandfonline.com/10. 1080/17470218.2015.1031144 Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. arbitrary stimulus in healthy participants. Subjects were biased towards the colour green by an information sheet. Attentional bias was assessed using a change detection task. After an interval of either 1 or 2 weeks participants were then either re-tested on the same change detection task, tested on a different change detection task where colour was irrelevant, or were biased towards an alternative colour. One experiment included trials in which the distracter stimuli (but never the target stimuli) were green. The key finding was that green stimuli in the second task attracted attention, despite this impairing task performance. Furthermore, inducing a second attentional bias did not override the initial bias toward green objects. The attentional bias also persisted for at least two weeks. It is argued that this persistent attentional bias is mediated by a chronic change to participants attentional control settings, which is aided by long-term representations involving contextual cuing. We speculate that similar changes to attentional control settings and continuous cuing may relate to attentional biases observed in psychopathologies. Targeting these biases may be a productive approach to treatment.Attentional Bias Development Although there has been great debate on how visual stimuli are selected for further processing (Theeuwes, 1991;1992;Belopolsky & Theeuwes, 2010;Folk et al., 1992;Bacon & Egeth, 1994), one generally accepted proposal is that observers can activate one of two distinctive attentional sets:Attentional Bias Development
5Singleton Detection Mode or Feature Search Mode (Bacon & Egeth, 1994; Leber & Egeth, 2006b).Singleton Detection Mode is based purely on the physical salience of an item, allowing the most salient item in a visual field -such as a feature singleton (a red item amongst greyscale items) -to capture attention. Alternatively, Feature Search Mode relies on a defining target feature -such as a particular colour -and is a much narrower attentional se...