Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory, Department of Physiology, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3G 1Y6, Canada.
Neuron. 2011 Dec 22;72(6):1067-79. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2011.10.013.
Visual attention has been classically described as a spotlight that enhances the processing of a behaviorally relevant object. However, in many situations, humans and animals must simultaneously attend to several relevant objects separated by distracters. To account for this ability, various models of attention have been proposed including splitting of the attentional spotlight into multiple foci, zooming of the spotlight over a region of space, and switching of the spotlight among objects. We investigated this controversial issue by recording neuronal activity in visual area MT of two macaques while they attended to two translating objects that circumvented a third distracter object located inside the neurons' receptive field. We found that when the attended objects passed through or nearby the receptive field, neuronal responses to the distracter were either decreased or remained unaltered. These results demonstrate that attention can split into multiple spotlights corresponding to relevant objects while filtering out interspersed distracters.
视觉注意力通常被描述为一个聚光灯，它可以增强对行为相关物体的处理。然而，在许多情况下，人类和动物必须同时关注几个被干扰物隔开的相关物体。为了说明这种能力，已经提出了各种注意力模型，包括将注意力聚光灯分成多个焦点，将聚光灯在空间区域上放大，以及在物体之间切换聚光灯。我们通过记录两只猕猴在视觉区域 MT 中的神经元活动来研究这个有争议的问题，当它们注视两个平移的物体时，这两个物体绕过位于神经元感受野内的第三个干扰物。我们发现，当被注视的物体穿过或靠近感受野时，对干扰物的神经元反应要么减少，要么保持不变。这些结果表明，注意力可以分成与相关物体对应的多个聚光灯，同时过滤掉穿插其中的干扰物。
