Sensory gain control (amplification) as a mechanism of selective attention: electrophysiological and neuroimaging evidence

Hillyard, Steven A.; Vogel, Edward K.; Luck, Steven J.

doi:10.1098/rstb.1998.0281

Cited by 1,035 publications

(819 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…The modulation by saliency suggests an effect of attention, rather than purely sensory effects of the stimulus, as the latter influence ERP latency and may result in relatively flat ERPs where early components are difficult to differentiate (Johannes et al, 1995). According to Hillyard et al (1998) attention has relatively pure effects on ERP amplitude that reflect its role as a gain control mechanism on early sensory responses. The fact that saliency and relevance only modulated ERP amplitude (not latency) supports an interpretation in terms of relatively pure attention effects.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Task relevance effects in electrophysiological brain activity: Early, but not first

2014

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A current controversy surrounds the question whether high-level features of a stimulus such as its relevance to the current task may affect early attentional processes. According to one view abruptly appearing stimuli gain priority during an initial feedforward processing stage and therefore capture attention even if they are irrelevant to the task. Alternatively, only stimuli that share a relevant property with the target may capture attention of the observer. Here, we used high-density EEG to test whether task relevance may modulate early feedforward brain activity, or whether it only becomes effective once the physical characteristics of the stimulus have been processed. We manipulated task relevance and visual saliency of distracters presented left or right of an upcoming central target. We found that only the relevance of distracters had an effect on manual reaction times to the target. However, the analysis of electrocortical activity revealed three discrete processing stages during which pure effects of distracter saliency (~80-160 ms), followed by an interaction between saliency and relevance (~130-240 ms) and finally pure effects of relevance (~230-370 ms) were observed. Electrical sources of early saliency effects and later relevance effects were localized in the posterior parietal cortex, predominantly over the right hemisphere. These findings support the view that during the initial feedforward stage only physical (bottom-up) factors determine cortical responses to visual stimuli, while top-down effects interfere at later processing stages.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Task relevance effects in electrophysiological brain activity: Early, but not first

2014

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“…Three ERP components are particularly relevant to the current study, the P1, N1, and P2. The amplitude of the first positivity (P1) and the first negativity (N1) appearing after presentation of a visual stimulus is influenced by the degree of visual attention the stimulus receives (Hillyard, Vogel, & Luck, 1998). Thus, in the dot-probe task, an increase in amplitude of the P1/N1 complex to the faces display is indicative of an increase in attention directed towards the face images, and would be expected to vary in response to presentation of the face stimuli in a dot-probe task as a function of participant attention.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affective primes suppress attention bias to threat in socially anxious individuals

Helfinstein

White

Bar‐Haim

2008

Behaviour Research and Therapy

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Anxious individuals show an attention bias towards threatening information. However, under conditions of sustained environmental threat this otherwise-present attention bias disappears. It remains unclear whether this suppression of attention bias can be caused by a transient activation of the fear system. In the present experiment, high socially-anxious and low socially-anxious individuals (HSA group, n = 12; LSA group, n = 12) performed a modified dot-probe task in which they were shown either a neutral or socially threatening prime word prior to each trial. EEG was collected and ERP components to the prime and faces displays were computed. The behavioral results indicated that HSA individuals show an attention bias to threat after a neutral prime, but no attention bias after a threatening prime, demonstrating that suppression of attention bias can occur after a transient activation of the fear system. Low Socially Anxious individuals showed an opposite pattern: no evidence of a bias to threat with neutral primes but induction of an attention bias to threat following threat primes. ERP results suggested differential processing of the primes and faces displays by HSA and LSA individuals. However, no group by prime interaction was found for any of ERP components.

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“…Furthermore, according to Hillyard et al (1999), stimulus-evoked neuronal activity can be modified by an attentionally induced additive bias or by a true gain modulation (present model parameters v b (v) and…”

Section: The Phase Oscillator Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

A nonlinear dynamics model for simulating long range correlations of cognitive bistability

Fürstenau

2010

Biol Cybern

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Simulation results of bistable perception due to ambiguous visual stimuli are presented which are obtained with a behavioral nonlinear dynamics model using perception-attention-memory coupling. This model provides an explanation of recent experimental results of Gao et al. (Cogn Process 7:105-112, 2006a) and it supports their speculation that the fractal character of perceptual dominance time series may be understood in terms of nonlinear and reentrant dynamics of brain processing. Percept reversals are induced by attention fatigue and noise, with an attention bias which balances the relative percept duration. Dynamical coupling of the attention bias to the perception state introduces memory effects leading to significant long range correlations of perceptual duration times as quantified by the Hurst parameter H > 0.5 (Mandelbrot, The fractal geometry of nature, 1991), in agreement with Gao et al. (Cogn Process 7:105-112, 2006a).

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Sensory gain control (amplification) as a mechanism of selective attention: electrophysiological and neuroimaging evidence

Cited by 1,035 publications

References 67 publications

Task relevance effects in electrophysiological brain activity: Early, but not first

Task relevance effects in electrophysiological brain activity: Early, but not first

Affective primes suppress attention bias to threat in socially anxious individuals

A nonlinear dynamics model for simulating long range correlations of cognitive bistability

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