Space, color, and direction of movement: How do they affect attention?

Abstract

Paying attention improves performance, but is this improvement regardless of what we attend to? We explored the differences in performance between attending to a location and attending to a feature when perceiving global motion. Attention was first cued to one of four locations that had coherently moving dots, while the remaining three had randomly moving distracter dots. Participants then viewed a colored display, wherein the color of the coherently moving dots was cued instead of location. In the third task, participants identified the location that had a particular cued direction of motion. Most observers reported reductions of motion threshold in all three tasks compared to when no cue was provided. However, the attentional bias generated by location cues was significantly larger than the bias resulting from feature cues of direction or color. This effect is consistent with the idea that attention is largely controlled by a fronto-parietal network where spatial relations are preferentially processed. On the other hand, color could not be used as a cue to focus attention and integrate motion. This finding suggests that color relies heavily on processing by ventral temporal cortical areas, which may have little control over the global motion areas in the dorsal part of the brain.

Dynamics of coherent activity between cortical areas defines a two-stage process of selective attention

“…In fact, the LIP feedback to MT seems to be purely spatial and makes little distinction between the different feature-selective cells in the corresponding retinotopic location (3). Human psychophysical experiments also reinforce the point that gating functions of the dorsal stream prioritise spatial locations rather than specific features (27). The different frequencies for the two functions may also be functionally fortuitous, consistent with recent evidence that the brain may use different synchronising frequencies for different functions (20).…”

Coding of spatial attention priorities and object features in the macaque lateral intraparietal cortex

“…Furthermore, in a motion task using both spatial and featural cues, human subjects' performance was determined more strongly by spatial attention rather than by feature‐based attention (Verghese et al. ). The concept of a strongly spatial nature of LIP output is also supported by a study that showed local inactivation of LIP leading to predominantly spatial deficits despite the presence of nonspatial modulatory signals in LIP neurons (Balan and Gottlieb ).…”

“…However, changes in object location may be missed by a serial search dominated largely by spatially localized feedback signals, and there is human psychophysical evidence suggesting that this is indeed the case (Horowitz and Wolfe 1998). Furthermore, in a motion task using both spatial and featural cues, human subjects' performance was determined more strongly by spatial attention rather than by feature-based attention (Verghese et al 2013). The concept of a strongly spatial nature of LIP output is also supported by a study that showed local inactivation of LIP leading to predominantly spatial deficits despite the presence of nonspatial modulatory signals in LIP neurons (Balan and Gottlieb 2009).…”

“…Though the output from LIP to early visual areas seems to be largely spatial (Saalmann et al 2007), and spatial cues tend to be dominant over feature-based cues in search tasks (Verghese et al 2013), featural information is also necessary for LIP to fulfill its role in selective attention. In many situations, objects sharing a specific feature are selectedfor example, all red cars in a car park if the car one is looking for is redfor subsequent serial processing (Treisman and Gormican 1988;Wolfe 1994Wolfe , 2007.…”

The neuropharmacology of attentional modulation in primate visual cortex

“…Additionally, with our chosen stimuli we aim to target area MT, an Original manuscripts 66 _______________________________________________________ electrophysiologically well-described visual area, showing to be strongly influenced by attention . Other studies showed the causality between attentional deployment and linear motion discrimination (Bosworth, Petrich & Dobkins, 2012;Liu, Fuller & Carrasco, 2006;Verghese, Anderson & Vidyasagar, 2013). However, theses studies only cover two states of attention, full and poor attention.…”