Attentional effort modulated by task difficulty

Urbach, Doron; Spitzer, Hedva

doi:10.1016/0042-6989(94)00305-x

Cited by 23 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…This study extends those findings by examining the effects of modulating the difficulty of a tone detection task by embedding it in noise at different SNRs. Behaviorally, increasing task difficulty has been shown to induce compensatory enhancement of attention (Boudreau et al, 2006; LaBerge et al, 1991; Lavie and Cox, 1997; Sade and Spitzer, 1998; Urbach and Spitzer, 1995; Yantis, 1996). Physiologically, this enhanced attention has been linked to increased responses to targets or more suppression of distracter responses (Chen et al, 2008).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Task Difficulty and Performance Induce Diverse Adaptive Patterns in Gain and Shape of Primary Auditory Cortical Receptive Fields

Atiani

Elhilali

David

et al. 2009

Neuron

204

210

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Attention is essential for navigating complex acoustic scenes, when the listener seeks to extract a foreground source while suppressing background acoustic clutter. This study explored the neural correlates of this perceptual ability by measuring rapid changes of spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRFs) in primary auditory cortex during detection of a target tone embedded in noise. Compared to responses in the passive state, STRF gain decreased during task performance in most cells. By contrast, STRF shape changes were excitatory and specific, being strongest in cells with best frequencies near the target tone. The net effect of these adaptations was to accentuate the representation of the target tone relative to the noise, by enhancing responses of near-target cells to the tone during high-SNR tasks, while suppressing responses of far-from-target cells to the masking noise in low-SNR tasks. These adaptive STRF changes were largest in high-performance sessions, confirming a close correlation with behavior

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Task Difficulty and Performance Induce Diverse Adaptive Patterns in Gain and Shape of Primary Auditory Cortical Receptive Fields

Atiani

Elhilali

David

et al. 2009

Neuron

204

210

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Because the allocation of attention is known to vary with task difficulty (Spitzer & Richmond, 1991;Urbach & Spitzer, 1995), we compensated for interindividual performance differences in the direction discrimination task as well as difficulty differences due to the different experimental settings, for example, standard size, or training effects during the course of the whole series of experiments. To ensure that the size perception experiments were performed under comparable conditions, we varied the deviation of motion direction from the vertical.…”

Section: Tuning Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attention changes perceived size of moving visual patterns

Henrich²,

2007

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Spatial attention shifts receptive fields in monkey extrastriate visual cortex toward the focus of attention (S. Ben Hamed, J. R. Duhamel, F. Bremmer, & W. Graf, 2002; C. E. Connor, J. L. Gallant, D. C. Preddie, & D. C. Van Essen, 1996; C. E. Connor, D. C. Preddie, J. L. Gallant, & D. C. Van Essen, 1997; T. Womelsdorf, K. Anton-Erxleben, F. Pieper, & S. Treue, 2006). This distortion in the retinotopic distribution of receptive fields might cause distortions in spatial perception such as an increase of the perceived size of attended stimuli. Here we test for such an effect in human subjects by measuring the point of subjective equality (PSE) for the perceived size of a neutral and an attended stimulus when drawing automatic attention to one of two spatial locations. We found a significant increase in perceived size of attended stimuli. Depending on the absolute stimulus size, this effect ranged from 4% to 12% and was more pronounced for smaller than for larger stimuli. In our experimental design, an attentional effect on task difficulty or a cue bias might influence the PSE measure. We performed control experiments and indeed found such effects, but they could only account for part of the observed results. Our findings demonstrate that the allocation of transient spatial attention onto a visual stimulus increases its perceived size and additionally biases subjects to select this stimulus for a perceptual judgment.

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“…Human psychophysical studies have demonstrated that attentional load, defined as either the number of relevant items or the complexity of the processing required for the task, can have a profound impact on behavioral effects of spatial attention (Lavie and Tsal 1994;Sade and Spitzer 1998;Urbach and Spitzer 1995). For example, orientation-discrimination thresholds for peripherally presented stimuli are elevated when subjects perform a demanding task at fixation, as opposed to merely fixating (Lee et al 1997).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Task Difficulty and Target Likelihood in Area V4 of Macaque Monkeys

Boudreau¹,

Williford²,

Maunsell³

2006

Journal of Neurophysiology

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sell. Effects of task difficulty and target likelihood in area V4 of macaque monkeys. J Neurophysiol 96: 2377-2387, 2006. First published July 19, 2006 doi:10.1152/jn.01072.2005. Spatial attention improves performance at attended locations and correspondingly modulates firing rates of cortical neurons. The size of these behavioral and neuronal effects depends on the difficulty of the task performed at the attended location. Psychological theorists have attributed this to a tighter focus of a fixed amount of processing resource at the attended location, but the effects of task difficulty on the distribution of neuronal effects of attention across the visual field have not been fully explored. We trained rhesus monkeys to do a detection task in which difficulty and spatial attention were manipulated independently. Probe stimuli were used to measure behavioral performance in different conditions of attention and difficulty. Animals performed better at attended locations and this advantage increased with difficulty, consistent with data from human psychophysics. Neuronal modulation by spatial attention was larger with greater difficulty. In two animals, increasing difficulty caused a modest increase in neuronal responses to visual stimuli regardless of the locus of spatial attention. In a third animal, which was previously trained to ignore multiple distracting stimuli, increasing task difficulty increased responses at the focus of attention and suppressed responses away from the focus of attention. The results show that difficulty can modulate effects of spatial attention in V4; it can alter the distribution of sensory responses across the visual scene in ways that may depend on the subject's behavioral strategy. I N T R O D U C T I O NHuman psychophysical studies have demonstrated that attentional load, defined as either the number of relevant items or the complexity of the processing required for the task, can have a profound impact on behavioral effects of spatial attention (Lavie and Tsal 1994;Sade and Spitzer 1998;Urbach and Spitzer 1995). For example, orientation-discrimination thresholds for peripherally presented stimuli are elevated when subjects perform a demanding task at fixation, as opposed to merely fixating (Lee et al. 1997). Increasing the difficulty of a central task reduces interference from peripheral distractors (LaBerge et al. 1991;Lavie and Cox 1997).Because high attentional load can reduce interference from distractors outside the attentional focus, it has been proposed that spatial attention has a fixed capacity and that increasing load at an attended location concentrates the fixed amount of attentional resource at that location, necessarily withdrawing it elsewhere (Lavie 1995). This attentional load hypothesis accounts for increases in behavioral performance at the focus of attention, as more attentional resource is directed there. In addition, it dictates a decline in performance away from the attentional focus as the resource is removed. What neurophysiological changes correspond to the...

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Attentional effort modulated by task difficulty

Cited by 23 publications

References 18 publications

Task Difficulty and Performance Induce Diverse Adaptive Patterns in Gain and Shape of Primary Auditory Cortical Receptive Fields

Task Difficulty and Performance Induce Diverse Adaptive Patterns in Gain and Shape of Primary Auditory Cortical Receptive Fields

Attention changes perceived size of moving visual patterns

Effects of Task Difficulty and Target Likelihood in Area V4 of Macaque Monkeys

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