The development of spatial visual attention has been extensively studied in infants, but far less is known about the emergence of object‐based visual attention. We tested 3–5‐ and 9–12‐month‐old infants on a task that allowed us to measure infants’ attention orienting bias toward whole objects when they competed with color, motion, and orientation feature information. Infants’ attention orienting to whole objects was affected by the dimension of the competing visual feature. Whether attention was biased toward the whole object or its salient competing feature (e.g., “ball” or “red”) changed with age for the color feature, with infants biased toward whole objects with age. Moreover, family socioeconomic status predicted feature‐based attention in the youngest infants and object‐based attention in the older infants when color feature information competed with whole‐object information.
Children (
- PAR ID:
- 10445918
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Child Development
- ISSN:
- 0009-3920
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Selective attention improves sensory processing of relevant information but can also impact the quality of perception. For example, attention increases visual discrimination performance and at the same time boosts apparent stimulus contrast of attended relative to unattended stimuli. Can attention also lead to perceptual distortions of visual representations? Optimal tuning accounts of attention suggest that processing is biased towards “off-tuned” features to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio in favor of the target, especially when targets and distractors are confusable. Here, we tested whether such tuning gives rise to phenomenological changes of visual features. We instructed participants to select a color among other colors in a visual search display and subsequently asked them to judge the appearance of the target color in a 2-alternative forced choice task. Participants consistently judged the target color to appear more dissimilar from the distractor color in feature space. Critically, the magnitude of these perceptual biases varied systematically with the similarity between target and distractor colors during search, indicating that attentional tuning quickly adapts to current task demands. In control experiments we rule out possible non-attentional explanations such as color contrast or memory effects. Overall, our results demonstrate that selective attention warps the representational geometry of color space, resulting in profound perceptual changes across large swaths of feature space. Broadly, these results indicate that efficient attentional selection can come at a perceptual cost by distorting our sensory experience.
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null (Ed.)Category learning is fundamental to cognition, but little is known about how it proceeds in real-world environments when learners do not have instructions to search for category-relevant information, do not make overt category decisions, and do not experience direct feedback. Prior research demonstrates that listeners can acquire task-irrelevant auditory categories incidentally as they engage in primarily visuomotor tasks. The current study examines the factors that support this incidental category learning. Three experiments systematically manipulated the relationship of four novel auditory categories with a consistent visual feature (color or location) that informed a simple behavioral keypress response regarding the visual feature. In both an in-person experiment and two online replications with extensions, incidental auditory category learning occurred reliably when category exemplars consistently aligned with visuomotor demands of the primary task, but not when they were misaligned. The presence of an additional irrelevant visual feature that was uncorrelated with the primary task demands neither enhanced nor harmed incidental learning. By contrast, incidental learning did not occur when auditory categories were aligned consistently with one visual feature, but the motor response in the primary task was aligned with another, category-unaligned visual feature. Moreover, category learning did not reliably occur across passive observation or when participants made a category-nonspecific, generic motor response. These findings show that incidental learning of categories is strongly mediated by the character of coincident behavior.more » « less
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Visual discomfort is related to the statistical regularity of visual images. The contribution of luminance contrast to visual discomfort is well understood and can be framed in terms of a theory of efficient coding of natural stimuli, and linked to metabolic demand. While color is important in our interaction with nature, the effect of color on visual discomfort has received less attention. In this study, we build on the established association between visual discomfort and differences in chromaticity across space. We average the local differences in chromaticity in an image and show that this average is a good predictor of visual discomfort from the image. It accounts for part of the variance left unexplained by variations in luminance. We show that the local chromaticity difference in uncomfortable stimuli is high compared to that typical in natural scenes, except in particular infrequent conditions such as the arrangement of colorful fruits against foliage. Overall, our study discloses a new link between visual ecology and discomfort whereby discomfort arises when adaptive perceptual mechanisms are overstimulated by specific classes of stimuli rarely found in nature.more » « less
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Key points Visual attention involves discrete multispectral oscillatory responses in visual and ‘higher‐order’ prefrontal cortices.
Prefrontal cortex laterality effects during visual selective attention are poorly characterized.
High‐definition transcranial direct current stimulation dynamically modulated right‐lateralized fronto‐visual theta oscillations compared to those observed in left fronto‐visual pathways.
Increased connectivity in right fronto‐visual networks after stimulation of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex resulted in faster task performance in the context of distractors.
Our findings show clear laterality effects in theta oscillatory activity along prefrontal–visual cortical pathways during visual selective attention.
Abstract Studies of visual attention have implicated oscillatory activity in the recognition, protection and temporal organization of attended representations in visual cortices. These studies have also shown that higher‐order regions such as the prefrontal cortex are critical to attentional processing, but far less is understood regarding prefrontal laterality differences in attention processing. To examine this, we selectively applied high‐definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD‐tDCS) to the left or right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). We predicted that HD‐tDCS of the left
versus right prefrontal cortex would differentially modulate performance on a visual selective attention task, and alter the underlying oscillatory network dynamics. Our randomized crossover design included 27 healthy adults that underwent three separate sessions of HD‐tDCS (sham, left DLPFC and right DLPFC) for 20 min. Following stimulation, participants completed an attention protocol during magnetoencephalography. The resulting oscillatory dynamics were imaged using beamforming, and peak task‐related neural activity was subjected to dynamic functional connectivity analyses to evaluate the impact of stimulation site (i.e. left and right DLPFC) on neural interactions. Our results indicated that HD‐tDCS over the left DLPFC differentially modulated right fronto‐visual functional connectivity within the theta band compared to HD‐tDCS of the right DLPFC and further, specifically modulated the oscillatory response for detecting targets among an array of distractors. Importantly, these findings provide network‐specific insight into the complex oscillatory mechanisms serving visual selective attention.
