Hanning Nina M, Deubel Heiner
Allgemeine und Experimentelle Psychologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, München, Germany.
Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, NY, United States.
J Neurophysiol. 2022 May 11. doi: 10.1152/jn.00084.2022.
Already before the onset of a saccadic eye movement, we preferentially process visual information at the upcoming eye fixation. This 'presaccadic shift of attention' is typically assessed via localized test items, which potentially bias the attention measurement. Here we show how presaccadic attention shapes perception from saccade origin to target when no scene-structuring items are presented. Participants made saccades into a 1/f ('pink') noise field, in which we embedded a brief orientation signal at various locations shortly before saccade onset. Local orientation discrimination performance served as a proxy for the allocation of attention. Results demonstrate that (1) the presaccadic attention shift is accompanied by considerable attentional costs at the presaccadic eye fixation; (2) saccades are preceded by shifts of attention to their goal location even if they are directed into an unstructured visual field, but the spread of attention, compared to target-directed saccades, is broad; We conclude that the absence or presence of saccade target objects markedly shapes the distribution of presaccadic attention, and likely the underlying (space-based or object-based) cortical control mechanism. Our findings demonstrate the relevance of an item-free approach for measuring attentional dynamics across the visual field.
甚至在眼球快速跳动开始之前，我们就优先处理即将到来的眼球注视点处的视觉信息。这种“跳动前的注意力转移”通常通过局部测试项目来评估，这可能会使注意力测量产生偏差。在这里，我们展示了在不呈现场景构建项目时，跳动前的注意力如何塑造从扫视起点到目标的感知。参与者向一个1/f（“粉色”）噪声场进行扫视，在扫视开始前不久，我们在该噪声场的不同位置嵌入了一个简短的方向信号。局部方向辨别性能作为注意力分配的指标。结果表明：（1）跳动前的注意力转移在跳动前的眼球注视点处伴随着相当大的注意力消耗；（2）即使扫视指向一个无结构的视野，扫视之前也会有注意力向其目标位置的转移，但与目标导向的扫视相比，注意力的分布范围更广；我们得出结论，扫视目标物体的有无显著地塑造了跳动前注意力的分布，以及可能的潜在（基于空间或基于物体）皮层控制机制。我们的研究结果证明了一种无项目方法对于测量整个视野中注意力动态的相关性。
