The cognitive neuroscience of visual attention

Behrmann, Marlene; Haimson, Craig

doi:10.1016/s0959-4388(99)80021-x

Cited by 35 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Considerable research, for the most part conducted in nonhuman primates, has revealed that the regulation of attention is an integral dynamic property of neural networks in cortex (for review of recent research, see Behrmann and Haimson, 1999). At the same time, increasing evidence points to a role for subcortical systems in the regulation of cortical processing in attention.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lesions of the Amygdala Central Nucleus Alter Performance on a Selective Attention Task

2000

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Previous studies showed a role for the amygdala central nucleus (CN) in attentional processing during the acquisition of Pavlovian associations. Both the acquisition of conditioned orienting responses and the surprise-induced enhancement in the ability of conditioned stimuli to enter into new associations depend on the integrity of CN. In this experiment, the role of CN in the performance of a well-learned selective attention task was examined. Rats with ibotenic acid lesions of CN and control rats first learned a discrete-trial, multiple-choice reaction time task. On each trial, after a constant-duration ready signal, the rats were required to poke their noses into one of three ports, guided by the brief illumination of one of those ports. Rats with CN lesions were slower to acquire the task than control rats but showed equivalent asymptotic sustained performance. Subsequent attentional challenges, which included reducing the duration of the port illumination and varying the duration of the ready signal, had greater impact on the performance of lesioned than control rats. These data resemble those reported from similar tasks after damage to the basal forebrain (BF) system. Together with earlier findings, these data support a role for CN in modulating visuospatial attention in action as well as in the acquisition of associations, perhaps by way of its projections to BF cholinergic systems.Key words: amygdala; central nucleus; selective attention; basal forebrain cholinergic system; reaction time; rats Recent data implicate the amygdala central nucleus (CN) in the modulation of attention during the acquisition of Pavlovian conditioning (for review, see Holland and Gallagher, 1999). First, the acquisition of conditioned orienting behavior (OR) to conditioned stimuli (CSs) paired with food depends on the integrity of amygdalonigrostriatal circuitry. Rats with bilateral lesions of CN (Gallagher et al., 1990) or with asymmetric lesions that disconnect CN from dorsolateral striatum (Han et al., 1997) fail to acquire these conditioned ORs. Second, neural circuitry that includes CN connections with basal forebrain (BF) structures is important for surprise-induced enhancements in the ability of CSs to enter into new associations, an attentional property known as "associability" (Pearce and Hall, 1980). These enhancements are abolished in rats by bilateral lesions of CN (Holland and Gallagher, 1993a,b), bilateral lesions of the large cholinergic neurons of the substantia innominata/nucleus basalis magnocellularis (SI/nBM;Chiba et al., 1995), and asymmetric lesions that disconnect CN from those SI/nBM neurons (Han et al., 1999).Other research demonstrates a role for the BF cholinergic system in the regulation of attentional processes engaged in sustained or selective attention tasks (Muir et al., 1992;Pang et al., 1993;Voytko et al., 1994;McGaughy et al., 1996;Chiba et al., 1999). In these tasks, animals perform previously learned responses under conditions thought to place demands on attentional processing of the stimuli ...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lesions of the Amygdala Central Nucleus Alter Performance on a Selective Attention Task

2000

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“…By incorporating cause and effect aspects of attentional theories, and by grounding attention in biological constructs, the biased competition model accounts for a multitude of findings (Behrmann & Haimson, 1999;O'Craven, Downing, & Kanwisher, 1999;Rees et al, 1997;Treue & Martinez, 1999).…”

Section: Critiques Of Effect Theories and The Emergence Of The Biasedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cause and Effect Theories of Attention: The Role of Conceptual Metaphors

Fernandez-Duque

Johnson

2002

Review of General Psychology

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Scientific concepts are defined by metaphors. These metaphors determine what attention is and what count as adequate explanations of the phenomenon. The authors analyze these metaphors within 3 types of attention theories: (a) "cause" theories, in which attention is presumed to modulate information processing (e.g., attention as a spotlight; attention as a limited resource); (b) "effect" theories, in which attention is considered to be a by-product of information processing (e.g., the competition metaphor); and (c) hybrid theories that combine cause and effect aspects (e.g., biasedcompetition models). The present analysis reveals the crucial role of metaphors in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and the efforts of scientists to find a resolution to the classic problem of cause versus effect interpretations.Everyone knows what attention is. (William James, 1890/1950 No one knows what attention is, and . . . there may even not be an "it" there to be known about (although of course there might be). (Pashler, 1998, p. 1) The history of attention research is not just an ongoing debate about how to explain the phenomena of attention. It is equally a debate about what attention is. It is widely recognized in contemporary philosophy of science (Hanson, 1958;Hesse, 1966;Kuhn, 1962) that our scientific theories determine what we regard as data, how we individuate phenomena, and what the criteria for an adequate explanation should be. The phenomena are not just "given" in some theory-independent fashion. Rather, our theories and concepts partly determine what we will take the relevant phenomena to be, and they thus determine what a good theory must account for.This fact is quite evident in the field of attention research, in which even a cursory survey reveals that there is no general agreement about what a theory of attention ought to explain. Different theories have different views of what counts as attention. Some theories, for example, assume that there is a specific mechanism of attention, and they then ask how it works. Is it a cognitive system made of interacting subcomponents discretely localized in the brain? Or is attention a pool of resources we allocate to effortful tasks? Other theories are skeptical that there is such a "thing" as attention. They view attention instead as an epiphenomenon of the workings of multiple independent cognitive systems. Thus, whereas some theories conceptualize attention as a real "cause" of various cognitive events, others view it as a mere "effect" of multiple cognitive operations.In this article, we argue that there is no way to identify attention independent of some theory of attention, and we argue that theories of attention are structured largely by conceptual metaphors. These metaphors provide the logic for our thinking and reasoning about the nature, structure, and processes of attention, and we cannot do without some set of metaphors, either in commonsense or in scientific models of the mind.

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“…For example, when exerting face recognition, only partial areas are activated. And the so-called "bias competition" is the core mechanism driving the whole cognition framework, which can also be interpreted as "winner-take-all" 30 . That is, only one or less part of inputs is processed in the neural net.…”

Section: Fire-on and Bias Competitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

<title>Feature element theory for image recognition and retrieval</title>

Zhang

2001

SPIE Proceedings

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Traditional systems of image retrieval work as "black boxes". The concrete process and result data or coefficients are not the real care point. Thus it brings the problem: these systems cannot fulfill general semantic application. To overcome the problem we turn to psychology and neuroscience to study the cognition mechanism of human brain. Based on the analysis of experiments and evidences, a new hypothesis -element presence theory is proposed to explain the truth of the whole visual cognition. As its basic level that deals with low-level feature data from camera or retina, feature element theory is illustrated in details. Besides, the evaluation on feature elements is discussed and the illustration on feature element theory based image retrieval system is also given.

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The cognitive neuroscience of visual attention

Cited by 35 publications

References 48 publications

Lesions of the Amygdala Central Nucleus Alter Performance on a Selective Attention Task

Lesions of the Amygdala Central Nucleus Alter Performance on a Selective Attention Task

Cause and Effect Theories of Attention: The Role of Conceptual Metaphors

<title>Feature element theory for image recognition and retrieval</title>

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