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    The control of attentional target selection in a colour/colour conjunction task

    Berggren, Nick and Eimer, Martin (2016) The control of attentional target selection in a colour/colour conjunction task. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 78 (8), pp. 2383-2396. ISSN 1943-3921.

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    Abstract

    To investigate the time course of attentional object selection processes in visual search tasks where targets are defined by a combination of features from the same dimension, we measured the N2pc component as an electrophysiological marker of attentional object selection during colour/colour conjunction search. In Experiment 1, participants searched for targets defined by a combination of two colours, while ignoring distractor objects that matched only one of these colours. Reliable N2pc components were triggered by targets and also by partially matching distractors, even when these distractors were accompanied by a target in the same display. The target N2pc was initially equal in size to the sum of the two N2pc components to the two different types of partially matching distractors, and became superadditive from about 250 ms after search display onset. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the superadditivity of the target N2pc was not due to a selective disengagement of attention from task-irrelevant partially matching distractors. These results indicate that attention was initially deployed separately and in parallel to all target-matching colours, before attentional allocation processes became sensitive to the presence of both matching colours within the same object. They suggest that attention can be controlled simultaneously and independently by multiple features from the same dimension, and that feature-guided attentional selection processes operate in parallel for different target-matching objects in the visual field.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Additional Information: The final publication is available at Springer via the link above.
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): Selective attention, Top-down control, Visual search, Event-related brain potentials, Feature-based attention, Feature integration, Object-based attention
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Depositing User: Martin Eimer
    Date Deposited: 08 Jul 2016 13:51
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:24
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/15565

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