Neural mechanisms of visual selective attention

Abstract

Visual selective attention improves our perception and performance by modifying sensory input.s at an early stage of processing. Spatial attention produces the most consistent early tnodulations of visual processing, which can be observed when attention is voluntarily allocated to locations. These effects of spatial attention are similar when attention is cued in a trial-by-trial, or sustained, fashion and are manifest as changes in the atnplitudes, but not the latencies, of evoked neural activity recorded from the intact human scalp. This modulation of sensory proces.sing first occurs within the extrastriate visual cortex and not within the striate or earlier subcortical proce.s.sing stages. The.se relatively early spatial filters alter the inputs to higher stages of visual analysis that are responsible for feature extraction and ultimately object perception and recognition, and thus provide phy.siological evidence for early precategorical selection during visual attention. Moreover, the physiological evidence extends early selection theories by providing neurophysiologically precise information about the stages of visual processing affected by attention. Descriptors: Event-related potentials. Selective attention. Vision, HumanIn everyday situations we are faced with a myriad of sensory inputs that compete for access to mental resources and, ultimately, for the control of behavior. The nervous system utilizes selection mechanisms to control the flow of these inputs, the result being profound effects on the way that attended and ignored events are subjectively perceived and later recalled. The principles by which this "selective attention" may operate have been considered by psychologists for more than 100 years (e.g., James, 1890James, /1950Von Helmholtz, 1924) and remain of intense interest today (for critical theoretical reviews, see Allport, 1993;Van der Heijden, 1992).The mechanisms of selective attention in humans have most often been investigated by measuring the influence of attentional

Age-related differences in auditory event-related potentials during a cued attention task

“…Amplitude modulations as a function of cueing are also present in visual ERPs beginning , 100 ms after target presentation, with larger amplitudes to valid targets in both younger (Luck, 1995;Mangun, 1995;Mangun and Hillyard, 1991) and older subjects (Curran et al, 2001). Age differences in ERP attention effects have not been studied using auditory cued attention tasks, but have been assessed using dichotic listening tasks.…”

Attractiveness and affordance shape tools neural coding: Insight from ERPs

“…Furthermore the visual N100 has been shown to be functionally independent from other visual evoked potentials, such as the P100 (Spitz et al, 1986;Luck and Hillyard, 1995). Specifically, the P100 typically peaks around 80-130 ms over occipital areas and is sensitive to spatial location in the visual field (Mangun, 1995), luminance (Cant et al, 1978), shape and color (Luck et al, 1995). Differently, the visual N100 has an early anterior (around 140 ms) and a later posterior deflection (temporo-occipital sites around 190 ms) and, although sensitive to low level attributes (i.e.…”

Selective visual-spatial attention alters induced gamma band responses in the human EEG

“…Psychophysiological studies measuring visual event-related potentials (VEPs) have shown that focusing the spotlight on a certain location in space leads to an enhancement of early sensory evoked responses as compared to when stimuli were presented outside the beam of the spotlight (e.g. Mangun et al, 1993;Gomez-Gonzales et al, 1994;Mangun, 1995;Anllo-Vento and Hillyard, 1996;Hillyard and AnlloVento, 1998;Luck and Ford, 1998). Moreover, human positron emission tomography (PET) studies have suggested that attending to a particular stimulus enhances cerebral blood¯ow in those cortical areas which are specialized for processing the relevant features of that stimulus (Corbetta et al, 1990;Corbetta et al, 1993;Heinze et al, 1994).…”