Matching Cue Size and Task Properties in Exogenous Attention

Abstract

Exogenous attention is an involuntary, reflexive orienting response that results in enhanced processing at the attended location. The standard view is that this enhancement generalizes across visual properties of a stimulus. We test whether the size of an exogenous cue sets the attentional field and whether this leads to different effects on stimuli with different visual properties. In a dual task with a random-dot kinematogram (RDK) in each quadrant of the screen, participants discriminated the direction of moving dots in one RDK and localized one red dot. Precues were uninformative and consisted of either a large or a small luminance-change frame. The motion discrimination task showed attentional effects following both large and small exogenous cues. The red dot probe localization task showed attentional effects following a small cue, but not a large cue. Two additional experiments showed that the different effects on localization were not due to reduced spatial uncertainty or suppression of RDK dots in the surround. These results indicate that the effects of exogenous attention depend on the size of the cue and the properties of the task, suggesting the involvement of receptive fields with different sizes in different tasks. These attentional effects are likely to be driven by bottom-up mechanisms in early visual areas.

Metacognitive Confidence Increases with, but Does Not Determine, Visual Perceptual Learning

“…30 healthy subjects (20 females) with a mean age of 31 years were tested. The sample size was chosen to exceed the number of subjects in previous transcranial stimulation [ 30 , 31 ] and psychophysical studies on human perceptual learning of visual motion discrimination [ 32 , 33 , 34 ] in order to detect significant effects in both domains. 29 participants were right-handed, one was left-handed, all had normal or corrected-to-normal visual acuity.…”

A critical review of the cognitive and perceptual factors influencing attentional scaling and visual processing

“…Although an early theory of attentional scaling assumed that narrowing attention unequivocally improved visual processing, recent work has shown this is not necessarily the case, where, in some instances, narrow attention has had either no impact, or even impaired visual processing (Chong & Treisman, 2005;Goodhew, Lawrence, & Edwards, 2017;Goodhew, Shen, & Edwards, 2016;Mounts & Edwards, 2017;Shulman & Wilson, 1987). To address these inconsistencies, three more recent accounts of attentional scaling and vision have been proposed: the selective spatial enhancement (SSE) account (Burnett, d'Avossa, & Sapir, 2013;Goodhew et al, 2017Goodhew et al, , 2016 the spatiotemporal trade-off account (STA; Goodhew et al, 2016;Shulman & Wilson, 1987), and the attentional attraction field (AAF) account as applied to attentional scaling (Baruch & Yeshurun, 2013;Mounts & Edwards, 2017). However, empirical evidence supporting each theory is not only limited but conflicting.…”

Dimensionally Specific Capture of Attention: Implications for Saliency Computation

“…While some theoretical models of bottom-up attention suggest that abrupt onset in an otherwise uniform field should produce cueing effects that are not graded [13,15], empirical data suggests otherwise. For example, Burnett, d’Avossa and Sapir [24] found that the size of an exogenous cue can affect the perceptual appraisal of a target. In a dual-task paradigm, participants discriminated the direction of coherent motion of one of four large random dot kinomatograms (RDKs) and localized a small colored probe.…”

“…The effects of cue size [24], contrast and luminance [20,25] indicate the contribution of cue properties to exogenous attentional effects. This suggests that exogenous attention is modulated bottom-up, by low-level features of the cue [24].…”

“…The effects of cue size [24], contrast and luminance [20,25] indicate the contribution of cue properties to exogenous attentional effects. This suggests that exogenous attention is modulated bottom-up, by low-level features of the cue [24]. Moreover, the influence of task set [18,26,27,28,29] indicates that top-down signals also modulate exogenous attention.…”