Exercise-Induced Fatigue and Caffeine Supplementation Affect Psychomotor Performance but Not Covert Visuo-Spatial Attention.

Event related potentials during covert orientation of visual attention: effects of cue validity and directionality

PASSIVE VISION AND ACTIVE VISION 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Passive vision 1.3 Visual attention 1.4 Active vision 1.5 Active vision and vision for action 1.6 Outline of the book BACKGROUND TO ACTIVE VISION 2.1 Introduction 2.2 The inhomogeneity of the visual projections 2.3 Parallel visual pathways 2.4 The oculomotor system 2.5 Saccadic eye movements 2.6 Summary VISUAL SELECTION, COVERT ATTENTION AND EYE MOVEMENTS 3.1 Covert and overt attention 3.2 Covert spatial attention 3.3 The relationship between covert and overt attention 3.4 Speed of attention 3.5 Neurophysiology of attention 3.6 Non-spatial attention 3.7 Active vision and attention 3.8 Summary VISUAL ORIENTING 4.1 Introduction 4.2 What determines the latency of orienting saccades? 4.3 Physiology of saccade initiation 4.4 What determines the landing position of orienting saccades? 4.5 Physiology of the WHERE system 4.6 The Findlay and Walker model 4.7 Development and plasticity VISUAL SAMPLING DURING TEXT READING 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Basic patterns of visual sampling during reading 5.3 Perception during fixations in reading 5.4 Language processing 5.5 Control of fixation duration 5.6 Control of landing position 5.7 Theories of eye control during reading 5.8 Practical aspects of eye control in reading 5.9 Overview VISUAL SEARCH 6.1 Visual search tasks 6.2 Theories of visual search 6.3 The need for eye movements in visual search 6.4 Eye movements in visual search 6.5 Ocular capture in visual search 6.6 Saccades in visual search: scanpaths 6.7 Physiology of visual search 6.8 Summary NATURAL SCENES AND ACTIVITIES 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Analytic studies of scene and object perception 7.3 Dynamic scenes and situations 7.4 Summary HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY 8.1 Blindsight 8.2 Neglect 8.3 Balint's syndrome and dorsal simultanagnosia 8.4 Frontal lobe damage 8.5 Orienting without eye movements 8.6 Summary SPACE CONSTANCY AND TRANS-SACCADIC INTEGRATION 9.1 The traditional approach: 'compensatory taking into account' 9.2 Trans-saccadic integration 9.3 Resolution of the conflicting results 9.4 Conclusion: The Active Vision Cycle 9.5 Future directions

Many studies have established that the strength of visual perception and the strength of visual representations within visual cortex vary according to the focus of covert spatial attention. While it is clear that attention can modulate visual signals, the source of this modulation remains unknown. We have examined the possibility that saccade related mechanisms provide a source of spatial attention by studying the effects of electrical microstimulation of the frontal eye fields (FEF) on spatial attention. Monkeys performed a task in which they had to detect luminance changes of a peripheral target while ignoring a flashing distracter. The target luminance change could be preceded by stimulation of the FEF at current levels below that which evoked saccadic eye movements. We found that when the target change was preceded by stimulation of FEF, the monkey could detect smaller changes in target luminance. The increased sensitivity to the target change only occurred when the target was placed in the part of the visual field represented by neurons at the stimulation site. The magnitude of improvement depended on the temporal asynchrony of the stimulation onset and the target event. No significant effect of stimulation was observed when long intervals (>300 ms) between stimulation and the target event were used, and the magnitude of the increased sensitivity decreased systematically with increasing asynchrony. At the shortest asynchrony, FEF stimulation temporally overlapped the target event and the magnitude of the improvement was comparable to that of removing the distracter from the task. These results demonstrate that transient, but potent improvements in the deployment of covert spatial attention can be obtained by microstimulation of FEF sites from which saccadic eye movements are also evoked.

The superior colliculus is an evolutionarily conserved midbrain region that is thought to mediate spatial orienting, including saccadic eye movements and covert spatial attention. Here, we reveal a role for the superior colliculus in higher-order cognition, independent of its role in spatial orienting. We trained rhesus macaques to perform an abstract visual categorization task that involved neither instructed eye movements nor differences in covert attention. We compared neural activity in the superior colliculus and the posterior parietal cortex, a region previously shown to causally contribute to abstract category decisions. The superior colliculus exhibits robust encoding of learned visual categories, which is stronger than in the posterior parietal cortex and arises at a similar latency in the two areas. Moreover, inactivation of the superior colliculus markedly impaired animals' category decisions. These results demonstrate that the primate superior colliculus mediates abstract, higher-order cognitive processes that have traditionally been attributed to the neocortex.

Independent spatiotemporal effects of spatial attention and background clutter on human object location representations

Title of Document: SPATIAL CUEING BY A NOVEL AGENT IN PRESCHOOL CHILDREN AND ADULTS Brandon Frank Terrizzi, Master of Science, 2015 Directed By: Assistant Professor Jonathan S. Beier, Ph.D. Department of Psychology In the current study we assessed preschool children and adults’ reflexive, covert spatial attentional response to a novel entity. In particular, we assessed whether covert attention was selectively engaged after construing the novel entity as an agent. Previous research has demonstrated that children and adults’ covert spatial attention may be flexibly engaged by a non-directional cueing stimulus (e.g., a circle), however this attentional response is neither spontaneous nor is it reflexive (i.e., participants were told that the stimulus predicted the eventual target’s location). For the first time we have shown that covert spatial attention is spontaneously and reflexively engaged by a morphologically unfamiliar cueing character when it is interpreted as an agent but not otherwise. The implication of this finding for theoretical accounts of the development of covert attention and agency attributions more generally are discussed. SPATIAL CUEING BY A NOVEL AGENT IN PRESCHOOL CHILDREN AND ADULTS

Visuomotor Origins of Covert Spatial Attention

In a standard Posner paradigm, participants were endogenously cued to attend to a peripheral location in visual space without making eye movements. They responded faster to target letters presented at cued than at uncued locations. On some trials, instead of a manual response, they had to move their eyes to a location in space. Results showed that the eyes deviated away from the validly cued location; when the cue was invalid and attention had to be allocated to the uncued location, eye movements also deviated away, but now from the uncued location. The extent to which the eyes deviated from cued and uncued locations was related to the dynamics of attention allocation. We hypothesized that this deviation was due to the successful inhibition of the attended location. The results imply that the oculomotor system is not only involved during the endogenous direction of covert attention to a cued location, but also when covert attention is directed to an uncued location. It appears that the oculomotor system is activated wherever spatial attention is allocated. The strength of saccade deviation might turn out to be an important measure for the amount of attention allocated to any particular location over time.

While aiming and shooting, we make tiny eye movements called microsaccades that shift gaze between task-relevant objects within a small region of the visual field. However, in the brief period before pressing the trigger, microsaccades are suppressed. This might be due to the lack of a requirement to shift gaze as the retinal images of the two objects begin to overlap on the fovea. Alternatively, we might actively suppress microsaccades to prevent any disturbances in visual perception caused by microsaccades around the time of their occurrence and their subsequent effect on shooting performance. In this study we looked at microsaccade rates while participants performed a simulated shooting task under two conditions: a normal condition in which they moved their eyes freely, and an eccentric condition in which they maintained gaze on a fixed target while performing the shooting task at 5° eccentricity. As expected, microsaccade rate dropped near the end of the task in the normal viewing condition. However, we also found the same decrease for the eccentric condition in which microsaccades did not shift gaze between the task objects. Microsaccades are also produced in response to shifts in covert attention. To test whether disengagement of covert attention from the eccentric shooting location caused the drop in microsaccade rate, we monitored the location of participants’ spatial attention by using a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) task simultaneously at a location opposite to the shooting task. Target letter detection at the RSVP location did not improve during the drop in microsaccade rate, suggesting that covert attention was maintained at the shooting task location. We conclude that in addition to their usual gaze-shifting function, microsaccades during fine-acuity tasks might be modulated by cognitive processes other than spatial attention.

Spatially localized motion aftereffect disappears faster from awareness when selectively attended to according to its direction

The topic of spatial attention is of great relevance for researchers in various fields, including neuropsychology, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive psychology, as well as for clinical practice. Deficits of spatial attentional arising from parietal brain damage remain largely confined to the left visual field. The mechanisms underlying this hemispheric asymmetry are still elusive. We mimicked the neuropsychological syndrome of contralesional extinction by temporarily inducing a spatial attentional bias in healthy volunteers with TMS. We investigated whether directing covert spatial attention could enhance or, more importantly, counteract the resulting behavioral deficits. Although both the left and right parietal TMS induced contralateral extinction, only left hemifield extinction following right parietal TMS was severely aggravated by a competing stimulus in the ipsilesional (right) hemifield. We put forward the hypothesis that an asymmetry with respect to the ability of detaching attention from a distractor is contributing to the right hemispheric lateralization with regard to extinction. On a broader level, we suggest that "virtual patients" might be used for evaluating neuropsychological treatment in an early stage of development, reducing the burden on actual patients.

Covert Visual Spatial Orienting and Saccades: Overlapping Neural Systems

Visual and oculomotor selection: links, causes and implications for spatial attention

Alpha oscillations are strongly modulated by spatial attention. To what extent, the generators of cortical alpha oscillations are spatially distributed and have selectivity that can be related to retinotopic organization is a matter of continuous scientific debate. In the present report, neuromagnetic activity was quantified by means of spatial location tuning functions from 30 participants engaged in a visuospatial attention task. A cue presented briefly in one of 16 locations directing covert spatial attention resulted in a robust modulation of posterior alpha oscillations. The distribution of the alpha sources approximated the retinotopic organization of the human visual system known from hemodynamic studies. Better performance in terms of target identification was associated with a more spatially constrained alpha modulation. The present findings demonstrate that the generators of posterior alpha oscillations are retinotopically organized when modulated by spatial attention.

A great deal is now known about the effects of spatial attention within individual sensory modalities, especially for vision and audition. However, there has been little previous study of possible crossmodal links in attention. Here we review recent findings from our own experiments on this topic, which reveal extensive spatial links between the modalities. An irrelevant but salient event presented within touch, audition, or vision, can attract covert spatial attention in the other modalities (with the one exception that visual events do not attract auditory attention when saccades are prevented). By shifting receptors in one modality relative to another, the spatial coordinates of these crossmodal interactions can be examined. For instance, when a hand is placed in a new position, stimulation of it now draws visual attention to a correspondingly different location, although some aspects of attention do not spatially remap in this way. Crossmodal links are also evident in voluntary shifts of attention. When a person strongly expects a target in one modality (e.g. audition) to appear in a particular location, their judgements improve at that location not only for the expected modality but also for other modalities (e.g. vision), even if events in the latter modality are somewhat more likely elsewhere. Finally, some of our experiments suggest that information from different sensory modalities may be integrated preattentively, to produce the multimodal internal spatial representations in which attention can be directed. Such preattentive crossmodal integration can, in some cases, produce helpful illusions that increase the efficiency of selective attention in complex scenes.