Implicit Attentional Selection of Bound Visual Features

Melcher, David; Papathomas, Thomas V.; Vidnyánszky, Zoltán

doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2005.04.023

Cited by 101 publications

(81 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…To understand these seemingly disparate results, note first that psychophysical studies finding separate processing, focused on spatial attention, as opposed to our study. Our findings concern feature attention and agree with recent findings that feature attention can more profoundly influence processing of stimuli than spatial attention (Melcher et al, 2005;Kanai et al, 2006). Note further that we presented the matched audio and visual stimuli simultaneously.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Multisensory Congruency as a Mechanism for Attentional Control over Perceptual Selection

et al. 2009

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The neural mechanisms underlying attentional selection of competing neural signals for awareness remains an unresolved issue. We studied attentional selection, using perceptually ambiguous stimuli in a novel multisensory paradigm that combined competing auditory and competing visual stimuli. We demonstrate that the ability to select, and attentively hold, one of the competing alternatives in either sensory modality is greatly enhanced when there is a matching cross-modal stimulus. Intriguingly, this multimodal enhancement of attentional selection seems to require a conscious act of attention, as passively experiencing the multisensory stimuli did not enhance control over the stimulus. We also demonstrate that congruent auditory or tactile information, and combined auditory-tactile information, aids attentional control over competing visual stimuli and visa versa. Our data suggest a functional role for recently found neurons that combine voluntarily initiated attentional functions across sensory modalities. We argue that these units provide a mechanism for structuring multisensory inputs that are then used to selectively modulate early (unimodal) cortical processing, boosting the gain of task-relevant features for willful control over perceptual awareness.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Multisensory Congruency as a Mechanism for Attentional Control over Perceptual Selection

et al. 2009

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“…These early multi-duty cells can have high temporal resolution and process combinations of features without perceptual awareness supporting a number of combined feature effects (Blaser et al, 2005;Houck & Hoffman, 1986;Humphrey & Goodale, 1998;Melcher, Papathomas, & Vidnyanszky, 2005;Rivest & Cavanagh, 1996;Vul & MacLeod, 2006;Wojciulik & Kanwisher, 1998). However, conscious perception may not have access to these representations any more than it can access the earliest multi-feature activity in retinal cells.…”

Section: Independent Feature Access By Attentionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Independent, synchronous access to color and motion features

Holcombe

Cavanagh

2008

Cognition

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We investigated the role of attention in pairing superimposed visual features. When moving dots alternate in color and in motion direction, reports of the perceived color and motion reveal an asynchrony: the most accurate reports occur when the motion change precedes the associated color change by ~100 ms [Moutoussis, K., & Zeki, S. (1997). A direct demonstration of perceptual asynchrony in vision. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 264,[393][394][395][396][397][398][399]. This feature binding asynchrony was probed by manipulating endogenous and exogenous attention. First, endogenous attention was manipulated by changing which feature dimension observers were instructed to attend to first. This yielded little effect on the asynchrony. Second, exogenous attention was manipulated by briefly presenting a ring around the target, cueing the report of the color and motion seen within the ring. This reduced or eliminated the apparent latency difference between color and motion. Accuracy was best predicted by timing of each feature relative to the cue rather than the timing of the two features relative to each other, suggesting independent attentional access to the two features with an exogenous attention cue. The timing of attentional cueing affected feature pairing reports as much as the timing of the features themselves.

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“…attention to one sensory feature/modality can spread to encompass associated signals from another task-irrelevant feature/modality, as if the latter is pulled into the attentional spotlight [36,37]. This phenomenon has been taken to suggest that the units of implicit attentional selection are object based [36]-whole objects are selected even when only one attribute is relevant [38]. Complementing this notion, our results demonstrate that cross-modal feature binding, in turn, accents the bound object and attracts attention in a multimodal saliency map.…”

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confidence: 99%

Olfaction spontaneously highlights visual saliency map

et al. 2013

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Attention is intrinsic to our perceptual representations of sensory inputs. Best characterized in the visual domain, it is typically depicted as a spotlight moving over a saliency map that topographically encodes strengths of visual features and feedback modulations over the visual scene. By introducing smells to two well-established attentional paradigms, the dot-probe and the visual-search paradigms, we find that a smell reflexively directs attention to the congruent visual image and facilitates visual search of that image without the mediation of visual imagery. Furthermore, such effect is independent of, and can override, top-down bias. We thus propose that smell quality acts as an object feature whose presence enhances the perceptual saliency of that object, thereby guiding the spotlight of visual attention. Our discoveries provide robust empirical evidence for a multimodal saliency map that weighs not only visual but also olfactory inputs.

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Implicit Attentional Selection of Bound Visual Features

Cited by 101 publications

References 30 publications

Multisensory Congruency as a Mechanism for Attentional Control over Perceptual Selection

Multisensory Congruency as a Mechanism for Attentional Control over Perceptual Selection

Independent, synchronous access to color and motion features

Olfaction spontaneously highlights visual saliency map

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