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Kim S, Cho YS. Feature-based attentional control for distractor suppression. Atten Percept Psychophys 2024; 86:1075-1085. [PMID: 38418806 DOI: 10.3758/s13414-024-02858-x] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 02/05/2024] [Indexed: 03/02/2024]
Abstract
To investigate whether attentional suppression is merely a byproduct of target facilitation or a result of independent mechanisms for distractor suppression, the present study examined whether attentional suppression takes place when target facilitation hardly occurs using a spatial cueing paradigm. Participants searched for target letters that were not red, i.e., a negative color. On each trial, a target color was randomly chosen among 12 colors to prevent establishing attentional control for target colors and to reduce intertrial priming for target colors. Immediately before a target display, a noninformative spatial cue was presented at one of the possible target locations. The cue was rendered in a negative color, which was to be ignored, to detect targets or the reference color, which was never presented for target and non-target letters. Experiment 1 showed that negative color cues captured attention less than reference color cues, suggesting feature-based attentional suppression. The suppression effect was replicated when the temporal interval between the onsets of the cue and target displays was reduced in Experiments 2 and 3, suggesting proactive suppression. Experiment 3 directly confirmed no attentional control settings for target colors and intertrial priming. These findings suggest that distractor features can guide attention at the pre-attentive stage when target features are not used to attend to targets.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sunghyun Kim
- School of Psychology, Korea University, 145, Anam-ro, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, Korea.
| | - Yang Seok Cho
- School of Psychology, Korea University, 145, Anam-ro, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, Korea
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2
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Narhi-Martinez W, Dube B, Chen J, Leber AB, Golomb JD. Suppression of a salient distractor protects the processing of target features. Psychon Bull Rev 2024; 31:223-233. [PMID: 37528277 PMCID: PMC11163954 DOI: 10.3758/s13423-023-02339-6] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 07/11/2023] [Indexed: 08/03/2023]
Abstract
We are often bombarded with salient stimuli that capture our attention and distract us from our current goals. Decades of research have shown the robust detrimental impacts of salient distractors on search performance and, of late, in leading to altered feature perception. These feature errors can be quite extreme, and thus, undesirable. In search tasks, salient distractors can be suppressed if they appear more frequently in one location, and this learned spatial suppression can lead to reductions in the cost of distraction as measured by reaction time slowing. Can learned spatial suppression also protect against visual feature errors? To investigate this question, participants were cued to report one of four briefly presented colored squares on a color wheel. On two-thirds of trials, a salient distractor appeared around one of the nontarget squares, appearing more frequently in one location over the course of the experiment. Participants' responses were fit to a model estimating performance parameters and compared across conditions. Our results showed that general performance (guessing and precision) improved when the salient distractor appeared in a likely location relative to elsewhere. Critically, feature swap errors (probability of misreporting the color at the salient distractor's location) were also significantly reduced when the distractor appeared in a likely location, suggesting that learned spatial suppression of a salient distractor helps protect the processing of target features. This study provides evidence that, in addition to helping us avoid salient distractors, suppression likely plays a larger role in helping to prevent distracting information from being encoded.
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Affiliation(s)
- William Narhi-Martinez
- Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, 1835 Neil Ave, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA.
| | - Blaire Dube
- Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, 1835 Neil Ave, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA
| | - Jiageng Chen
- Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, 1835 Neil Ave, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA
| | - Andrew B Leber
- Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, 1835 Neil Ave, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA
| | - Julie D Golomb
- Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, 1835 Neil Ave, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA
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3
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Beffara B, Hadj‐Bouziane F, Hamed SB, Boehler CN, Chelazzi L, Santandrea E, Macaluso E. Separate and overlapping mechanisms of statistical regularities and salience processing in the occipital cortex and dorsal attention network. Hum Brain Mapp 2023; 44:6439-6458. [PMID: 37877138 PMCID: PMC10681649 DOI: 10.1002/hbm.26520] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/12/2023] [Revised: 09/15/2023] [Accepted: 10/05/2023] [Indexed: 10/26/2023] Open
Abstract
Attention selects behaviorally relevant inputs for in-depth processing. Beside the role of traditional signals related to goal-directed and stimulus-driven control, a debate exists regarding the mechanisms governing the effect of statistical regularities on attentional selection, and how these are integrated with other control signals. Using a visuo-spatial search task under fMRI, we tested the joint effects of statistical regularities and stimulus-driven salience. We found that both types of signals modulated occipital activity in a spatially specific manner. Salience acted primarily by reducing the attention bias towards the target location when associated with irrelevant distractors, while statistical regularities reduced this attention bias when the target was presented at a low probability location, particularly at the lower levels of the visual hierarchy. In addition, we found that both statistical regularities and salience activated the dorsal frontoparietal network. Additional exploratory analyses of functional connectivity revealed that only statistical regularities modulated the inter-regional coupling between the posterior parietal cortex and the occipital cortex. These results show that statistical regularities and salience signals are both spatially represented at the occipital level, but that their integration into attentional processing priorities relies on dissociable brain mechanisms.
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Affiliation(s)
- Bertrand Beffara
- Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences de Lyon (CRNL)Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, CNRS, INSERMBronFrance
| | - Fadila Hadj‐Bouziane
- Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences de Lyon (CRNL)Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, CNRS, INSERMBronFrance
| | - Suliann Ben Hamed
- Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, Lyon, UMR5229, CNRSUniversité de LyonLyonFrance
| | - C. Nico Boehler
- Department of Experimental PsychologyGhent UniversityGhentBelgium
| | - Leonardo Chelazzi
- Department of Neuroscience, Biomedicine, and Movement SciencesUniversity of VeronaVeronaItaly
| | - Elisa Santandrea
- Department of Neuroscience, Biomedicine, and Movement SciencesUniversity of VeronaVeronaItaly
| | - Emiliano Macaluso
- Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences de Lyon (CRNL)Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, CNRS, INSERMBronFrance
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Noah S, Meyyappan S, Ding M, Mangun GR. Time Courses of Attended and Ignored Object Representations. J Cogn Neurosci 2023; 35:645-658. [PMID: 36735619 PMCID: PMC10024573 DOI: 10.1162/jocn_a_01972] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 02/04/2023]
Abstract
Selective attention prioritizes information that is relevant to behavioral goals. Previous studies have shown that attended visual information is processed and represented more efficiently, but distracting visual information is not fully suppressed, and may also continue to be represented in the brain. In natural vision, to-be-attended and to-be-ignored objects may be present simultaneously in the scene. Understanding precisely how each is represented in the visual system, and how these neural representations evolve over time, remains a key goal in cognitive neuroscience. In this study, we recorded EEG while participants performed a cued object-based attention task that involved attending to target objects and ignoring simultaneously presented and spatially overlapping distractor objects. We performed support vector machine classification on the stimulus-evoked EEG data to separately track the temporal dynamics of target and distractor representations. We found that (1) both target and distractor objects were decodable during the early phase of object processing (∼100 msec to ∼200 msec after target onset), and (2) the representations of both objects were sustained over time, remaining decodable above chance until ∼1000-msec latency. However, (3) the distractor object information faded significantly beginning after about 300-msec latency. These findings provide information about the fate of attended and ignored visual information in complex scene perception.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sean Noah
- University of California, Davis.,University of California, Berkeley
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5
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Negative and positive templates: Two forms of cued attentional control. Atten Percept Psychophys 2022; 85:585-595. [PMID: 36348265 DOI: 10.3758/s13414-022-02590-4] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 09/28/2022] [Indexed: 11/09/2022]
Abstract
Our ability to control our attention to focus on goal-relevant information is critical for functioning in daily life. In addition to the typical attentional control driven by target enhancement described in most theories of attention, recent research has focused on our ability to use information about distractions maintained in working memory to direct our attention away from known distractors. Using these negative templates can improve the efficiency of attention, much in the same way as enhancing information matching search targets. However, these effects only occur for specific tasks or in specific circumstances. In this review, I will focus on our emerging understanding of the relationship between distractor ignoring from negative templates and target enhancement from positive templates. I will also highlight key remaining questions for further study.
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Beffara B, Hadj-Bouziane F, Hamed SB, Boehler CN, Chelazzi L, Santandrea E, Macaluso E. Dynamic causal interactions between occipital and parietal cortex explain how endogenous spatial attention and stimulus-driven salience jointly shape the distribution of processing priorities in 2D visual space. Neuroimage 2022; 255:119206. [PMID: 35427770 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119206] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/04/2021] [Revised: 03/15/2022] [Accepted: 04/08/2022] [Indexed: 10/18/2022] Open
Abstract
Visuo-spatial attention prioritizes the processing of relevant inputs via different types of signals, including current goals and stimulus salience. Complex mixtures of these signals engage in everyday life situations, but little is known about how these signals jointly modulate distributed patterns of activity across the occipital regions that represent visual space. Here, we measured spatio-topic, quadrant-specific occipital activity during the processing of visual displays containing both task-relevant targets and salient color-singletons. We computed spatial bias vectors indexing the effect of attention in 2D space, as coded by distributed activity in the occipital cortex. We found that goal-directed spatial attention biased activity towards the target and that salience further modulated this endogenous effect: salient distractors decreased the spatial bias, while salient targets increased it. Analyses of effective connectivity revealed that the processing of salient distractors relied on the modulation of the bidirectional connectivity between the occipital and the posterior parietal cortex, as well as the modulation of the lateral interactions within the occipital cortex. These findings demonstrate that goal-directed attention and salience jointly contribute to shaping processing priorities in the occipital cortex and highlight that multiple functional paths determine how spatial information about these signals is distributed across occipital regions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Bertrand Beffara
- IMPACT Team, Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, INSERM, U1028, CNRS, UMR5292, University of Lyon, Bron Cedex, France.
| | - Fadila Hadj-Bouziane
- IMPACT Team, Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, INSERM, U1028, CNRS, UMR5292, University of Lyon, Bron Cedex, France
| | - Suliann Ben Hamed
- Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, Lyon, UMR5229, CNRS, Université de Lyon, France
| | - C Nico Boehler
- Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium
| | - Leonardo Chelazzi
- Department of Neuroscience, Biomedicine and Movement Sciences, University of Verona, Italy
| | - Elisa Santandrea
- Department of Neuroscience, Biomedicine and Movement Sciences, University of Verona, Italy
| | - Emiliano Macaluso
- IMPACT Team, Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, INSERM, U1028, CNRS, UMR5292, University of Lyon, Bron Cedex, France
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7
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Remington R, Folk CL. Themes and variations: A response to commentaries on Luck, et al. (2021). VISUAL COGNITION 2021. [DOI: 10.1080/13506285.2021.1979446] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/20/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Roger Remington
- Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
| | - Charles L. Folk
- Department of Psychology, Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA
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