Martinez Cedillo, Priscilla orcid.org/0000-0001-7327-3614, Dent, Kevin and Foulsham, Tom (2022) Do cognitive load and ADHD traits affect the tendency to prioritise social information in scenes? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 904–1918. ISSN 1747-0226
Abstract
We report two experiments investigating the effect of working memory (WM) load on selective attention. Experiment 1 was a modified version of Lavie et al. and confirmed that increasing memory load disrupted performance in the classic flanker task. Experiment 2 used the same manipulation of WM load to probe attention during the viewing of complex scenes while also investigating individual differences in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) traits. In the image-viewing task, we measured the degree to which fixations targeted each of two crucial objects: (1) a social object (a person in the scene) and (2) a non-social object of higher or lower physical salience. We compared the extent to which increasing WM load would change the pattern of viewing of the physically salient and socially salient objects. If attending to the social item requires greater default voluntary top-down resources, then the viewing of social objects should show stronger modulation by WM load compared with viewing of physically salient objects. The results showed that the social object was fixated to a greater degree than the other object (regardless of physical salience). Increased salience drew fixations away from the background leading to slightly increased fixations on the non-social object, without changing fixations on the social object. Increased levels of ADHD-like traits were associated with fewer fixations on the social object, but only in the high-salient, low-load condition. Importantly, WM load did not affect the number of fixations on the social object. Such findings suggest rather surprisingly that attending to a social area in complex stimuli is not dependent on the availability of voluntary top-down resources.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © Experimental Psychology Society 2022. |
Keywords: | ADHD traits,Cognitive load,salience,social information,working memory |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Sciences (York) > Psychology (York) |
Depositing User: | Pure (York) |
Date Deposited: | 20 Jan 2022 15:39 |
Last Modified: | 13 Mar 2025 05:28 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218211066475 |
Status: | Published |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/17470218211066475 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:182785 |
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Description: Do cognitive load and ADHD traits affect the tendency to prioritise social information in scenes?
Licence: CC-BY 2.5