Verghese Ashika, Anderson Andrew J, Vidyasagar Trichur R
Department of Optometry & Vision Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia.
J Vis. 2013 Jul 19;13(8):20. doi: 10.1167/13.8.20.
Paying attention improves performance, but is this improvement regardless of what we attend to? We explored the differences in performance between attending to a location and attending to a feature when perceiving global motion. Attention was first cued to one of four locations that had coherently moving dots, while the remaining three had randomly moving distracter dots. Participants then viewed a colored display, wherein the color of the coherently moving dots was cued instead of location. In the third task, participants identified the location that had a particular cued direction of motion. Most observers reported reductions of motion threshold in all three tasks compared to when no cue was provided. However, the attentional bias generated by location cues was significantly larger than the bias resulting from feature cues of direction or color. This effect is consistent with the idea that attention is largely controlled by a fronto-parietal network where spatial relations are preferentially processed. On the other hand, color could not be used as a cue to focus attention and integrate motion. This finding suggests that color relies heavily on processing by ventral temporal cortical areas, which may have little control over the global motion areas in the dorsal part of the brain.
集中注意力能提高表现，但这种提高是否与我们所关注的内容无关呢？我们探究了在感知全局运动时，关注位置和关注特征在表现上的差异。注意力首先被引导至四个有连贯移动点的位置之一，而其余三个位置有随机移动的干扰点。然后，参与者观看一个彩色显示屏，其中连贯移动点的颜色被提示，而非位置。在第三个任务中，参与者要识别具有特定提示运动方向的位置。与未提供提示时相比，大多数观察者报告在所有三个任务中运动阈值都有所降低。然而，位置提示产生的注意力偏差明显大于方向或颜色特征提示所产生的偏差。这种效应与以下观点一致，即注意力在很大程度上由一个优先处理空间关系的额顶叶网络控制。另一方面，颜色不能用作引导注意力和整合运动的提示。这一发现表明，颜色在很大程度上依赖于腹侧颞叶皮质区域的处理，而该区域可能对大脑背侧的全局运动区域几乎没有控制权。
