Niezależność czy współpraca? Zagadnienie interakcji wzbudzeniowego i wykonawczego systemu uwagi

Independence or cooperation? On the issue of interaction between alerting and executive attention systemsAccording to Posner and colleagues, mechanism of attention consists of three systems: alerting, orienting and executive. Here, we focus on relationship between two of them, namely,  on the interactions between alerting and executive attention in tasks involving cognitive or motor conflicts. Previous studies suggest that the impact of alerting on the efficiency of conflict resolution may depend on various factors, including the presence of established stimulus-response associations, speed of the reaction selection process, characteristics of the allocation of spatial attention, and a stage of processing at which conflict occurs i.e., either perceptual analysis or response selection.  However, the available results are to some extent contradictory and no single hypothesis is sufficient to explain all cases of the interactions between alerting and executive attention observed so far. The present paper provides a comprehensive review of these results and hypothetical mechanisms underlying the relationship between alerting and executive attention