Object-based attentional selection—Grouped arrays or spatially invariant representations?: Comment on Vecera and Farah (1994).

Kramer, Arthur F.; Weber, Timothy A.; Watson, Stephen E.

doi:10.1037/0096-3445.126.1.3

Cited by 102 publications

(162 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…The first property is that, in both loci, shift events elicited greater BOLD activation than hold events, suggesting that posterior parietal cortex, bilaterally, issues a transient switch signal that initiates shifts of attention to a new spatial location. The presence of a signal that triggers attentional shifts is compatible with behavioral theories of attentional orienting that cite differences between validly (targets appearing within the same spatial location as the cue) and invalidly cued targets (targets appearing in a location other than the cue) as evidence for space-based attentional selection (8,12,16,21,22,27,28). These findings suggest that the posterior parietal cortex issues a transient signal to reorient one's current attentional locus.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 68%

Cortical systems mediating visual attention to both objects and spatial locations

Shomstein

Behrmann

2006

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Natural visual scenes consist of many objects occupying a variety of spatial locations. Given that the plethora of information cannot be processed simultaneously, the multiplicity of inputs compete for representation. Using event-related functional MRI, we show that attention, the mechanism by which a subset of the input is selected, is mediated by the posterior parietal cortex (PPC). Of particular interest is that PPC activity is differentially sensitive to the object-based properties of the input, with enhanced activation for those locations bound by an attended object. Of great interest too is the ensuing modulation of activation in early cortical regions, reflected as differences in the temporal profile of the blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) response for within-object versus between-object locations. These findings indicate that object-based selection results from an object-sensitive reorienting signal issued by the PPC. The dynamic circuit between the PPC and earlier sensory regions then enables observers to attend preferentially to objects of interest in complex scenes.attentional selection ͉ object-based attention ͉ superior parietal cortex E fficiently representing visual information requires selecting only a fraction of the multitude of information that is available to the visual system at any one instant in time. Attentional selection is the mechanism by which the subset of incoming information is extracted from the complex sensory environment. Early models of attentional selection suggested that attention is directed to regions in space (1-4), whereas more recent models have also included object-based representations as possible candidates of attentional selection (5-10). The focus of this study is on elucidating the neural mechanisms subserving attentional selection, but with more specific emphasis on differentiating between the neural substrate of space-based and object-based attention. In particular, we trace the neural signal that gives rise to an advantage for selected space-based versus object-based information from the source of the attentional selection to its effects (modulations) in primary sensory cortex.Although much progress has been made in understanding the behavioral mechanisms mediating attentional selection, most neurophysiological studies have focused solely on space-based attentional selection (4, 11-15), with few exceptions (10,(15)(16)(17)(18). To examine and distinguish between the neural bases of spacebased and object-based attentional selection, we used functional MRI to address two main goals. First, we investigated the source of the attentional control signal by examining the sensitivity of frontoparietal regions to space-based versus object-based shifts of attentional selection (12,19,20). Second, we examined the effects of both space-based and object-based attentional modulations of activation in extrastriate regions of the occipital cortex (Fig. 1). Specifically, we asked whether (i) parietal cortex issues a brief transient signal after an instruction to shift on...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 68%

Cortical systems mediating visual attention to both objects and spatial locations

Shomstein

Behrmann

2006

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…These findings suggest that object-based selection may indeed operate independently of location-based selection. Still, several challenges have been leveled at the notion that attention is allocated to spatially invariant object representations (see Baylis & Driver, 1993;Kramer et al, 1997;Vecera, 1994). Most of these challenges are specific to experiments using superimposed objects.…”

Section: Object-based Attentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An understanding of the degree to which these two types of attention may be separate or complementary will ultimately aid our understanding of the neural circuitry and cognitive architecture of visual attention. However, achieving this understanding has been difficult (see Baylis & Driver, 1993;Buxbaum, Coslett, Montgomery, & Farah, 1996;Kim & Cave, 1995;Kramer, Weber, & Watson, 1997;Vecera, 1994Vecera, , 1997Vecera & Farah, 1994). …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Objects and their locations in exogenous cuing

Schendel

Robertson

Treisman

2001

Perception & Psychophysics

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These neurobiologicalstudies have provided evidence that attention modulates perceptual processing at various levels in the visual system. Yet, how and when attention is directed remains a topic of investigation.Behavioral studies have contributed extensively toward an understanding of attention by exploring which aspects of the visual environment are selected. For instance, evidence has accumulated in support of object-based mechanisms of attention in addition to space-based mechanisms (Behrmann, Zemel, & Mozer, 1998;Duncan, 1984;Egly, Driver, & Rafal, 1994;Jordan & Tipper, 1998a, 1998bMarshall & Halligan, 1993;Moore, Yantis, & Vaughan, 1998;Tipper & Behrmann, 1996;Tipper & Weaver, 1998;Treisman, Kahneman, & Burkell, 1983). An understanding of the degree to which these two types of attention may be separate or complementary will ultimately aid our understanding of the neural circuitry and cognitive architecture of visual attention. However, achieving this understanding has been difficult (see Baylis & Driver, 1993;Buxbaum, Coslett, Montgomery, & Farah, 1996;Kim & Cave, 1995;Kramer, Weber, & Watson, 1997;Vecera, 1994Vecera, , 1997Vecera & Farah, 1994). The Where / What DistinctionNeurobiological evidence in support of a distinction between object and location processing in the visual system comes from studies of brain-damaged patients and anatomical studies in monkeys. Investigations of neurological patients have revealed compelling dissociations between object localization and object identification abilities (Farah, 1990;Robertson, Treisman, Friedman-Hill, & Grabowecky, 1997). The neural basis of these dissociations has been attributed to complementary pathways for visual analysis-namely, a dorsal where pathway that is important for analyzing the location and movement of visual stimuli and a ventral what pathway that is more involved in object identification (Mishkin, Ungerleider, & Macko, 1983;Ungerleider & Haxby, 1994).A similar distinction appears in the attention literature in the debate between attentional selection of objects and 577Copyright 2001 Psychonomic Society, Inc. Anatomical, physiological, and behavioral studies provide support for separate object-and locationbased components of visual attention. Although studies of object-based components have usually involved voluntary attention, more recent evidence has suggested that objects may play an independent role in reflexive exogenous orienting, at least at long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). In the present experiments, the role of objects in reflexive attentional orienting was investigated by developing a task in which location and object cuing could be separately examined for both short and long SOAs. Typical location cuing effects were obtained, indicating facilitation at short cue-target intervals and inhibition of return (IOR) at longer intervals. In contrast, object cuing resulted in facilitation for cued objects at long cue-target intervals and no object-based IOR. Interestingly,object cuing primarily affected targets at cued locations, a...

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“…Object-based attention is generally explained either in terms of selecting abstract, location-independent representations (Vecera & Farah, 1994) or in terms of selecting a region of the visual field belonging to the object without selecting other regions (Kim & Cave, 1995Kramer, Weber, & Watson, 1997). In both accounts, attention is assumed to improve the quality of the perceptual representation of the selected item or its region.…”

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confidence: 99%

Reinstating object-based attention under positional certainty: The importance of subjective parsing

Chen

Cave

2006

Perception & Psychophysics

118

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Previous studies have shown that interference from flanking distractors can be modulated by the object organization of the scene. The experiments reported here test for object-based attention under conditions of positional certainty, which allow a narrow focus of attention to the target. Prior research has suggested that object-based attention does not arise in these circumstances, but the experiments presented here show that object-based attention can still appear if previous experience with the stimuli leads participants to interpret the stimulus pattern as two separate objects. Two control experiments demonstrate that the appearance of object-based attention is not due simply to a widening of the focus of spatial attention. The presence of object-based attention in such a focused-attention task argues against Shomstein and Yantis's (2002) proposed explanation of object-based attention based on priority in the order of visual search.

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Object-based attentional selection—Grouped arrays or spatially invariant representations?: Comment on Vecera and Farah (1994).

Cited by 102 publications

References 39 publications

Cortical systems mediating visual attention to both objects and spatial locations

Cortical systems mediating visual attention to both objects and spatial locations

Objects and their locations in exogenous cuing

Reinstating object-based attention under positional certainty: The importance of subjective parsing

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