The time course of feature- selective attention inside and outside the focus of spatial attention

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Hillyard, Steven A.; Andersen, Soren K.
• 署名单位: University of Southern Denmark; University of Aberdeen; University of California System; University of California San Diego; Leibniz Association; Leibniz Institut fur Neurobiologie (LIN)
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-8868
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2309975121
• 发表日期: 2024-04-16
• 关键词: early visual areas; neural mechanisms; color; responses; enhancement; stimuli; facilitation; suppression; location; DYNAMICS

摘要

Research on attentional selection of stimulus features has yielded seemingly contradictory results. On the one hand, many experiments in humans and animals have observed a global facilitation of attended features across the entire visual field, even when spatial attention is focused on a single location. On the other hand, several event- related potential studies in humans reported that attended features are enhanced at the attended location only. The present experiment demonstrates that these conflicting results can be explained by differences in the timing of attentional allocation inside and outside the spatial focus of attention. Participants attended to fields of either red or blue randomly moving dots on either the left or right side of fixation with the task of detecting brief coherent motion targets. Recordings of steady - state visual evoked potentials elicited by the flickering stimuli allowed concurrent measurement of the time course of feature- selective attention in visual cortex on both the attended and the unattended sides. The onset of feature- selective attentional modulation on the attended side occurred around 150 ms earlier than on the unattended side. This finding that feature- selective attention is not spatially global from the outset but extends to unattended locations after a temporal delay resolves previous contradictions between studies finding global versus hierarchical selection of features and provides insight into the fundamental relationship between feature - based and location - based (spatial) attention mechanisms.