Central attention is serial, but midlevel and peripheral attention are parallel—A hypothesis

Abstract

In this brief review, we will argue that attention falls along a hierarchy from peripheral through central mechanisms. We further argue that these mechanisms are distinguished not just by their functional roles in cognition, but also by a distinction between serial mechanisms (associated with central attention) and parallel mechanisms (associated with mid-level and peripheral attention). In particular, we suggest that peripheral attentional deployments in distinct representational systems may be maintained simultaneously with little or no interference, but that the serial nature of central attention means that even tasks that largely rely on distinct representational systems will come into conflict when central attention is demanded. We go on to review both behavioral and neural evidence for this prediction. We conclude that even though the existing evidence mostly favors our account of serial central and parallel non-central attention, we know of no experiment that has conclusively borne out these claims. As such, this paper offers a framework of attentional mechanisms that will aid in guiding future research on this topic.

Switching attention from internal to external information processing: A review of the literature and empirical support of the resource sharing account

“…However, these valuable and recent research efforts mostly focused on comparing control mechanisms between the two domains, but did not investigate it at an overarching level, i.e., when it is used to switch between them. In this respect, it should be noted that there exist general models proposing a serial, unified control mechanism in cognitive processing that are potentially relevant for the matter under scrutiny here (Tamber-Rosenau, Dux, Tombu, Asplund, & Marois, 2013;Tamber-Rosenau & Marois, 2016). Moreover, earlier studies conducted by Burgess and colleagues (Burgess et al, 2007;Gilbert et al, 2005) have already addressed this question indirectly.…”

The Sources of Dual-task Costs in Multisensory Working Memory Tasks

“…One possibility is that these executive processes operate in a strictly serial fashion (Marti, Sigman, & Dehaene, 2012;Tamber-Rosenau & Marois, 2016), so that top-down signals to visual or tactile regions are sent at different points in time, with rapid switches between transient visual and tactile WM activation processes. Another possibility is that these executive control processes operate in parallel, but that interference between them results in less efficient or less precisely targeted feedback signals (Oberauer & Kliegl, 2004) relative to unimodal WM tasks.…”

A common source of attention for auditory and visual tracking

“…Many theories differentiate between perceptual attention (attending to perceptual inputs) and central attention (selection at postperceptual stages of processing, such as response selection) (Chun et al, 2011 ; Duncan et al, 1997 ; Johnston, McCann, & Remington, 1995 ; Luck & Vecera, 2002 ; Pashler, 1989 ; Posner & Boies, 1971 ). Whereas central attention is considered amodal, perceptual attention is regarded as modality-specific (Tamber-Rosenau & Marois, 2016 ). With respect to that framework, mounting evidence suggests that classifying multiple-object tracking (MOT) paradigms as perceptual attention tasks (Alvarez & Cavanagh, 2005 ; Scholl, 2001 ; Sears & Pylyshyn, 2000 ) may not be warranted.…”