Neural correlates of binding features within- or cross-dimensions in visual conjunction search: An fMRI study

Wei, Ping; Müller, Hermann J.; Pollmann, Stefan; Zhou, Xiaolin

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.04.024

Cited by 25 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 47 publications

(73 reference statements)

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“…Our results point to both the IPS, an area in the dorsal posterior parietal cortex implicated in endogenous attention processes and in visual feature search among multidimensional stimuli (Culham and Kanwisher, 2001;Chica et al, 2011;Liu et al, 2011;Wei et al, 2011) and the dlPFC, a frontal area associated with attentional control, in particular in the interaction with posterior parietal cortex, and in switching between different tasks (Dove et al, 2000;Corbetta and Shulman, 2002). Much work suggests that the dlPFC mediates shifts in attention between perceptual features of complex stimuli according to task demands, as is required, for instance, in the WCST and its animal analogs (Owen et al, 1991; Dias et al, 1996aDias et al, ,b, 1997Birrell and Brown, 2000;Dalley et al, 2004;Buchsbaum et al, 2005;Fletcher et al, 2005;Floresco et al, 2008).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 53%

Reinforcement Learning in Multidimensional Environments Relies on Attention Mechanisms

et al. 2015

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In recent years, ideas from the computational field of reinforcement learning have revolutionized the study of learning in the brain, famously providing new, precise theories of how dopamine affects learning in the basal ganglia. However, reinforcement learning algorithms are notorious for not scaling well to multidimensional environments, as is required for real-world learning. We hypothesized that the brain naturally reduces the dimensionality of real-world problems to only those dimensions that are relevant to predicting reward, and conducted an experiment to assess by what algorithms and with what neural mechanisms this "representation learning" process is realized in humans. Our results suggest that a bilateral attentional control network comprising the intraparietal sulcus, precuneus, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is involved in selecting what dimensions are relevant to the task at hand, effectively updating the task representation through trial and error. In this way, cortical attention mechanisms interact with learning in the basal ganglia to solve the "curse of dimensionality" in reinforcement learning.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 53%

Reinforcement Learning in Multidimensional Environments Relies on Attention Mechanisms

et al. 2015

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“…These parietal regions are frequently activated during visual search, particularly in response to abrupt sensory changes in the display, which in turn lead to attentional shifts within or across feature dimensions (Liu et al, 2003; Wei et al, 2011; Yantis et al, 2002). The IPS and SPL are also associated with various aspects of top-down attentional control (Egner et al, 2008; Pollmann et al, 2003; Shulman et al, 2003; Vossel et al, 2013), but the absence of a target predictability effect in these data indicate a greater contribution from the sensory-level aspects of parietal activation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age mediation of frontoparietal activation during visual feature search

Madden¹,

Parks²,

Davis³

et al. 2014

NeuroImage

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Activation of frontal and parietal brain regions is associated with attentional control during visual search. We used fMRI to characterize age-related differences in frontoparietal activation in a highly efficient feature search task, detection of a shape singleton. On half of the trials, a salient distractor (a color singleton) was present in the display. The hypothesis was that frontoparietal activation mediated the relation between age and attentional capture by the salient distractor. Participants were healthy, community-dwelling individuals, 21 younger adults (19 – 29 years of age) and 21 older adults (60 – 87 years of age). Top-down attention, in the form of target predictability, was associated with an improvement in search performance that was comparable for younger and older adults. The increase in search reaction time (RT) associated with the salient distractor (attentional capture), standardized to correct for generalized age-related slowing, was greater for older adults than for younger adults. On trials with a color singleton distractor, search RT increased as a function of increasing activation in frontal regions, for both age groups combined, suggesting increased task difficulty. Mediational analyses disconfirmed the hypothesized model, in which frontal activation mediated the age-related increase in attentional capture, but supported an alternative model in which age was a mediator of the relation between frontal activation and capture.

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“…Here we investigated the representation of task relevant feature dimensions as attention templates, i.e., working memory representations of targets in an upcoming search task. Previous work has consistently found dorsal and ventral attention network involvement in crossdimensional feature conjunction search 40–42 , attention shifts between dimensions, dimensional uncertainty 27 , and within-dimension conjunction search 43 . In the present study, we provide evidence that this network is involved in the representation of task relevant feature dimensions in a target template using RSA.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Task relevance modulates the cortical representation of feature conjunctions in the target template

Reeder

Hanke

Pollmann

2017

Sci Rep

Self Cite

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Little is known about the cortical regions involved in representing task-related content in preparation for visual task performance. Here we used representational similarity analysis (RSA) to investigate the BOLD response pattern similarity between task relevant and task irrelevant feature dimensions during conjunction viewing and target template maintenance prior to visual search. Subjects were cued to search for a spatial frequency (SF) or orientation of a Gabor grating and we measured BOLD signal during cue and delay periods before the onset of a search display. RSA of delay period activity revealed that widespread regions in frontal, posterior parietal, and occipitotemporal cortices showed general representational differences between task relevant and task irrelevant dimensions (e.g., orientation vs. SF). In contrast, RSA of cue period activity revealed sensory-related representational differences between cue images (regardless of task) at the occipital pole and additionally in the frontal pole. Our data show that task and sensory information are represented differently during viewing and during target template maintenance, and that task relevance modulates the representation of visual information across the cortex.

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Neural correlates of binding features within- or cross-dimensions in visual conjunction search: An fMRI study

Cited by 25 publications

References 47 publications

Reinforcement Learning in Multidimensional Environments Relies on Attention Mechanisms

Reinforcement Learning in Multidimensional Environments Relies on Attention Mechanisms

Age mediation of frontoparietal activation during visual feature search

Task relevance modulates the cortical representation of feature conjunctions in the target template

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