Spatial attention and conscious perception: the role of endogenous and exogenous orienting

Abstract

Attention has often been considered to be a gateway to consciousness (Posner, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 91(16), 7398-7403, 1994). However, its relationship with conscious perception (CP) remains highly controversial. While theoretical models and experimental data support the role of attention in CP (Chica, Lasaponara, Lupiáñez, Doricchi, & Bartolomeo, NeuroImage, 51, 1205-1212, 2010; Dehaene, Changeux, Naccache, Sackur, & Sergent, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 204-211, 2006; Mack & Rock, Inattentional blindness, 1998), recent studies have claimed that at least some forms of attention--endogenous or top-down spatial attention--are neither sufficient nor necessary for CP (Koch & Tsuchiya, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 16-22, 2007). In the present experiments, we demonstrate the importance of exogenously triggered attention for the modulation of CP. Weak or null effects were instead observed when attention was triggered endogenously. Our data are discussed in the framework of recent neuropsychological models (Dehaene et al., Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 204-211, 2006), postulating that activity within reverberating frontoparietal networks, as colocalized with spatial-orienting systems, is the brain correlate of consciously processed information

Interference Control Modulations Over Conscious Perception

“…For example, Kusnir et al (2011) found that an auditory cue eliciting phasic alerting improved participants’ ability to discriminate a near-threshold stimulus, especially when targets were temporally unpredictable. Concerning spatial attention, exogenous attention modulates conscious access (Chica et al, 2010, 2011), producing larger (and more consistent) effects than endogenous attention does (Chica et al, 2012). In order to broadly complete the theoretical framework on the relation between attention and conscious perception, modulations of the anterior network of executive control (the third attention network in Posner and Petersen’s model) over consciousness must also be explored.…”

“…Following Posner and Petersen’s model (Posner and Petersen, 1990; Petersen and Posner, 2012), attention can be dissected into alerting, orienting, and executive control networks. Previous literature has already explored alerting and orienting contributions to conscious perception (Wyart and Tallon-Baudry, 2008; Chica et al, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2016; Kusnir et al, 2011; Wyart et al, 2011; Chica and Bartolomeo, 2012; Botta et al, 2014). For example, Kusnir et al (2011) found that an auditory cue eliciting phasic alerting improved participants’ ability to discriminate a near-threshold stimulus, especially when targets were temporally unpredictable.…”

Exogenous attention to unseen objects?

“…In particular, recent work by Chica and Bartolomeo (e.g. Chica, Lasaponara, Chanes, Valero-Cabré, Doricchi, Lupiáñez et al, 2011;Chica, Botta, Lupiáñez & Bartolomeo, 2012;Chica, Paz-Alonso, Valero-Cabre & Bartolomeo, 2012) suggests that the coupling of attention and consciousness is much stronger when attention is under exogenous, as opposed to endogenous, control. That is, only when attention is captured automatically by external events (exogenously controlled), rather than voluntarily directed by the observer (endogenously controlled), is it not sufficient for awareness.…”

Animal Consciousness

“…From these competitive neural interactions, believed to be relatively slow, attention progressively emerges. The direction of the attention will depend on the result of the competitive interactions (Desimone and Duncan, 1995;Chica et al, 2011;Corbetta and Shulman, 2002;Pinto et al, 2013). This process is called "biased competition"; the attention given to an object is influenced or biased, by its intrinsic features and top-down processes to give priority to the most relevant stimuli (Desimone and Duncan, 1995).…”