Visual attention mechanisms show a center—surround organization

Abstract

The sudden onset of a cue triggers visual attention, which then enhances visual processing in the zone near the cue. This enhancement causes a motion illusion in subsequent stimuli presented near the cue. At greater separations from the cue, the illusory motion reverses direction, indicating prolonged processing speed. Measurements of the strength and direction of illusory motion at increasing separations from the cue reveal an attentional 'perceptive field' with an excitatory center at the locus cued and an inhibitory surround subtending the remaining visual field. These findings help explain the traditional attentional 'benefits' and 'costs' of attention.

Object and spatial representations in the corner enhancement effect

“…As Scholl (2001) hypothesized, the spotlight can indeed distort. This concurs with many other accounts of how new objects distort their surrounding visual space (Miyauchi et al, 1992;Ruda, 1998;Steinman, Steinman, & Lehmkuhle, 1995;Suzuki & Cavanagh, 1997Tsal & Shalev, 1996). In the present article, we report six experiments assessing how the corner effect relates to space-based and object-based theories of attention.…”

Towards a unified theory of neocortex: laminar cortical circuits for vision and cognition

“…This prediction was first made as part of ART in the 1970's (Grossberg, 1976(Grossberg, , 1978(Grossberg, , 1980(Grossberg, , 1999a(Grossberg, , 1999c. It has since received both of psychological and neurobiological empirical confirmation in the visual system (Bullier et al, 1996;Caputo and Guerra, 1998;Downing, 1988;Mounts, 2000;Reynolds, Chelazzi, and Desimone, 1999;Smith, Singh, and Greenlee, 2000;Somers et al, 1999;Sillito et al, 1994;Steinman, Steinman, and Lehmkuhle, 1995;Vanduffell, Tootell, and Orban, 2000). Based on such data, this property has recently been restated, albeit without a precise anatomical realization, in terms of the concept of "biased competition" (Desimone, 1998;Kastner and Ungerleider, 2001), in which attention biases the competitive influences within the network.…”

Linking Attention to Learning, Expectation, Competition, and Consciousness

“…More generally, the prediction that top-down attention has an on-center off-surround characteristic has received a considerable amount of psychological and neurobiological empirical confirmation in the visual system (Bullier, et al, 1996;Caputo and Guerra, 1998;Downing, 1988;Mounts, 2000;Reynolds, Chelazzi, and Desimone, 1999;Smith, Singh, and Greenlee, 2000;Somers, et al, 1999;Sillito, et al, 1994;Steinman, Steinman, and Lehmkuhle, 1995;Vanduffell, Tootell, and Orban, 2000). In particular, the claim that bottom-up sensory activity is enhanced when matched by top-down on-center signals is in accord with an extensive neurophysiological literature showing the facilitatory effect of attentional feedback (Luck, et al, 1997;Roelfsema, et al, 1998;Sillito, et al, 1994), but not with models in which matches with top-down feedback cause suppression (Mumford, 1992;Rao and Ballard, 1999).…”