Senoussi Mehdi, Moreland James C, Busch Niko A, Dugué Laura
ISAE-Supaéro, Université Fédérale de Toulouse, Toulouse, France.
Present address: Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
J Vis. 2019 May 1;19(5):22. doi: 10.1167/19.5.22.
Voluntary attention is at the core of a wide variety of cognitive functions. Attention can be oriented to and sustained at a location or reoriented in space to allow processing at other locations-critical in an ever-changing environment. Numerous studies have investigated attentional orienting in time and space, but little is known about the spatiotemporal dynamics of attentional reorienting. Here we explicitly manipulated attentional reorienting using a cuing procedure in a two-alternative forced-choice orientation-discrimination task. We interrogated attentional distribution by flashing two probe stimuli with various delays between the precue and target stimuli. Then we used the probabilities that both probes and neither probe were correctly reported to solve a second-degree equation, which estimates the report probability at each probe location. We demonstrated that attention reorients periodically at ∼4 Hz (theta) between the two stimulus locations. We further characterized the processing dynamics at each stimulus location, and demonstrated that attention samples each location periodically at ∼11 Hz (alpha). Finally, simulations support our findings and show that this method is sufficiently powered, making it a valuable tool for studying the spatiotemporal dynamics of attention.
随意注意是多种认知功能的核心。注意力可以被定向到一个位置并在该位置持续保持，或者在空间中重新定向，以便在其他位置进行处理——这在不断变化的环境中至关重要。许多研究已经探讨了注意力在时间和空间上的定向，但对于注意力重新定向的时空动态却知之甚少。在这里，我们在一个二选一的强制选择定向辨别任务中，通过使用线索化程序明确地操控了注意力的重新定向。我们通过在提示刺激和目标刺激之间以不同延迟闪现两个探测刺激来探究注意力的分布。然后我们使用两个探测刺激都被正确报告和两个探测刺激都未被正确报告的概率来求解一个二次方程，该方程估计每个探测刺激位置的报告概率。我们证明了注意力在两个刺激位置之间以约4赫兹（θ波）的频率周期性地重新定向。我们进一步刻画了每个刺激位置的处理动态，并证明了注意力以约11赫兹（α波）的频率周期性地对每个位置进行采样。最后，模拟结果支持了我们的发现，并表明该方法具有足够的效力，使其成为研究注意力时空动态的一个有价值的工具。
