Vanderbilt Vision Research Center, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37240, USA.
Brain Res. 2009 Nov 10;1297:101-11. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2009.08.011. Epub 2009 Aug 12.
Symbolic visual cues indicating the location of an upcoming target are believed to invoke endogenous shifts of attention to cued locations. In the present study, we investigated how visual attention is shifted during such cuing paradigms by recording event-related potentials (ERPs). We focused on a component known to index lateralized shifts of perceptual attention during visual search tasks, known as the N2pc component. The ERP data show that attention was shifted to a cued location in anticipation of a target shape when the location is marked by a placeholder object (Experiments 1 and 2). However, when the possible locations were not marked by placeholder objects, we found no evidence for an anticipatory shift of attention to the cued location (Experiment 3). These findings indicate that the perceptual attention mechanism indexed by the N2pc is deployed to objects and not simply locations in space devoid of object structure.
符号视觉提示被认为可以引起内源性注意转移到提示位置。在本研究中，我们通过记录事件相关电位（ERP）来研究在这种提示范式下视觉注意力是如何转移的。我们专注于一个在视觉搜索任务中已知的指标，称为 N2pc 成分，它表示感知注意的侧化转移。ERP 数据表明，当位置由占位符对象标记时（实验 1 和 2），注意力会在预期目标形状时转移到提示位置。然而，当可能的位置没有被占位符对象标记时，我们没有发现注意力向提示位置预先转移的证据（实验 3）。这些发现表明，N2pc 索引的感知注意机制被部署到对象上，而不仅仅是空间中没有对象结构的位置上。
