Jenkins, Michael and Grubert, Anna and Eimer, Martin (2016) Rapid parallel attentional selection can be controlled by shape and alphanumerical category. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 28 (11), pp. 1672-1687. ISSN 0898-929X.
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Abstract
Previous research has shown that when two colour-defined target objects appear in rapid succession at different locations, attention is deployed independently and in parallel to both targets. The present study investigated whether this rapid simultaneous attentional target selection mechanism can also be employed in tasks where targets are defined by a different visual feature (shape) or when alphanumerical category is the target selection attribute. Two displays that both contained a target and a nontarget object on opposite sides were presented successively, and the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the two displays was 100 ms, 50 ms, 20 ms, or 10 ms in different blocks. N2pc components were recorded to both targets as a temporal marker of their attentional selection. When observers searched for shape-defined targets (Experiment 1), N2pc components to the two targets were equal in size and overlapped in time when the SOA between the two displays was short, reflecting two parallel shape-guided target selection processes with their own independent time course. Essentially the same temporal pattern of N2pc components was observed when alphanumerical category was the target-defining attribute (Experiment 2), demonstrating that the rapid parallel attentional selection of multiple target objects is not restricted to situations where the deployment of attention can be guided by elementary visual features, but that these processes can even be employed in category-based attentional selection tasks. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the cognitive and neural basis of top-down attentional control.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | Attention, visual search, top-down control, event-related brain potentials |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences |
| Depositing User: | Martin Eimer |
| Date Deposited: | 07 Jul 2016 14:25 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:23 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/15127 |
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