Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Graduate Program, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, United States.
Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, La Jolla, United States.
Neuropsychologia. 2019 Sep;132:107122. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2019.107122. Epub 2019 Jun 14.
A sudden visual or acoustic change in the environment can capture attention involuntarily and facilitate perceptual processing of a subsequent visual target at the same location. The behavioral consequences of this involuntary (exogenous) cueing of attention have been well documented, but the underlying neural mechanisms and how they may differ depending on the modality of the cue remain unknown. We here report the effects of a spatially uninformative visual cue on the processing of a subsequent visual target and neural activity elicited by the cue itself and compare these results to the effects of an auditory cue. The results reveal that both visual and auditory cues enhanced the perceived brightness contrast of the subsequent co-localized target and boosted early cortical processing of the target beginning at about 100 ms post-target onset. Furthermore, both visual and auditory cues elicited a slow positive deflection (visible on target-absent trials) that was larger over contralateral relative to ipsilateral occipital scalp regions and was hypothesized to reflect the biasing of visual sensitivity for potential targets at that location. Overall, the data suggest that sudden events in the environment - regardless of sensory modality - initiate involuntary shifts of attention to the event's location and that the visual-perceptual consequences and neural mechanisms of these involuntary shifts are qualitatively similar for auditory and visual events.
环境中突然出现的视觉或听觉变化会不由自主地吸引注意力，并促进对同一位置后续视觉目标的感知处理。这种非自愿（外源性）注意提示的行为后果已经得到了很好的记录，但潜在的神经机制以及它们如何因提示的模态而异仍然未知。我们在这里报告了空间上无信息的视觉提示对后续视觉目标处理的影响以及提示本身引起的神经活动，并将这些结果与听觉提示的影响进行了比较。结果表明，视觉和听觉提示都增强了后续共定位目标的感知亮度对比度，并在目标出现后约 100ms 开始增强目标的早期皮层处理。此外，视觉和听觉提示都引起了一个缓慢的正偏移（在没有目标的试验中可见），在对侧相对于同侧枕叶头皮区域更大，据推测这反映了在该位置对潜在目标的视觉敏感性的偏向。总的来说，数据表明，环境中的突发事件 - 无论感觉模态如何 - 都会引起对事件位置的非自愿注意力转移，并且这些非自愿转移的视觉感知后果和神经机制对于听觉和视觉事件在性质上是相似的。
