Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, People's Republic of China, State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Beijing 100101, People's Republic of China.
Proc Biol Sci. 2013 Aug 14;280(1768):20131729. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2013.1729. Print 2013 Oct 7.
Attention is intrinsic to our perceptual representations of sensory inputs. Best characterized in the visual domain, it is typically depicted as a spotlight moving over a saliency map that topographically encodes strengths of visual features and feedback modulations over the visual scene. By introducing smells to two well-established attentional paradigms, the dot-probe and the visual-search paradigms, we find that a smell reflexively directs attention to the congruent visual image and facilitates visual search of that image without the mediation of visual imagery. Furthermore, such effect is independent of, and can override, top-down bias. We thus propose that smell quality acts as an object feature whose presence enhances the perceptual saliency of that object, thereby guiding the spotlight of visual attention. Our discoveries provide robust empirical evidence for a multimodal saliency map that weighs not only visual but also olfactory inputs.
注意是我们对感觉输入的知觉表象所固有的。它在视觉领域中表现得最为明显，通常被描绘为一个聚光灯在一个突显图上移动，突显图对视觉特征的强度以及对视觉场景的反馈调节进行地形编码。通过将嗅觉引入到两个成熟的注意力范式，即点探测和视觉搜索范式中，我们发现，嗅觉会反射性地将注意力引导到与视觉图像一致的位置，并在没有视觉意象的情况下促进对该图像的视觉搜索。此外，这种效果是独立于并且可以超越自上而下的偏见的。因此，我们提出气味质量充当了一个物体特征，其存在增强了该物体的知觉显著性，从而引导视觉注意力的聚光灯。我们的发现为一个多模态突显图提供了有力的实证证据，该图不仅对视觉输入，而且对嗅觉输入进行加权。
