Nonretinotopic Exogenous Attention

Abstract

Summary Attention is crucial for visual perception because it allows the visual system to effectively use its limited resources by selecting behaviourally and cognitively relevant stimuli from the large amount of information impinging on the eyes. Reflexive, stimulus-driven attention is essential for successful interactions with the environment because it can, for example, speed up responses to life threatening events. It is commonly believed that exogenous attention operates in the retinotopic coordinates of the early visual system. Here, using a novel experimental paradigm [1], we show that a non-retinotopic cue improves both accuracy and reaction times in a visual search task. Furthermore, the influence of the cue is limited both in space and time, a characteristic typical of exogenous cueing. These and other recent findings show that many more aspects of vision are processed non-retinotopically than previously thought.

Exogenous object-centered attention

“…A recent study by Boi et al (2011) had also cast some doubts on the strict retinotopy of exogenous attention. Boi et al used a cuing paradigm in which the exogenous cue (an abrupt onset) was followed by a variant of the Ternus-Pikler display in which three squares appeared to move laterally in tandem as a group.…”

“…Overall, these findings point to a possible role for objectcentered attention in exogenous spatial cueing (see also Boi, Vergeer, Ogmen, & Herzog, 2011). The present study was designed to determine whether the classic Posner exogenous cuing effect possibly operates in nonretinotopic coordinates.…”

Automatic frame-centered object representation and integration revealed by iconic memory, visual priming, and backward masking

“…No differences were found on the error rates. Clearly, these results reveal a frame-centered priming effect that cannot be explained by working memory (Hollingworth, 2007;Jiang et al, 2000) or attentional learning (Barrett et al, 2003;Boi, Vergeer, et al, 2011;Umilta et al, 1995). In short, frame-centered priming reflects both low-level visual featural representation and high-level identity representation.…”

“…Previous studies show that one can voluntarily direct attention to a remote, frame-centered location (Barrett, Bradshaw, & Rose, 2003;Boi, Vergeer, Ogmen, & Herzog, 2011;Umilta, Castiello, Fontana, & Vestri, 1995) and learn to allocate attention to a relative location within a frame (Kristjansson, Mackeben, & Nakayama, 2001;Maljkovic & Nakayama, 1996; C. R. Olson & Gettner, 1995), but empirical evidence for automatic frame-centered object representation is bleak, perhaps owing to the challenge in isolating frame-centered processes from object-based (framebased) and space-based processes. Our conceptual approach to isolating frame-centered effect is to (a) present two preceding or trailing objects on the same frame and equidistant from the target, effectively controlling object-based (frame-based) effect and space-based effect, and (b) manipulate the target's relative location within its frame.…”

Field-like interactions between motion-based reference frames

“…These predictions have also been tested formally, and the results lend further support to the RFMF theory (Aydın et al, 2008). Moreover, why and how attention is allocated to moving stimuli (Boi et al, 2009;Boi, Vergeer, Öğmen, & Herzog, 2011) and why masking is retinotopic but form perception can escape masking when a motion is predictable are other predictions of the RFMF theory that we have recently tested experimentally (Noory, Herzog, & Öğmen, in press), and we have demonstrated that RFMF can be implemented computationally to explain data at the quantitative level (Clarke et al, 2015).…”