The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Westmead Innovation Quarter, 160 Hawkesbury Rd, Westmead NSW 2145, Australia.
Unité de Recherche en Neurosciences Cognitives (UNESCOG), ULB Neuroscience Institue (UNI), Center for Research in Cognition & Neurosciences (CRCN), Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Avenue Franklin Roosevelt, 50-CP191, 1050 Brussels, Belgium.
Cereb Cortex. 2024 Jun 4;34(6). doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhae228.
Observers can selectively deploy attention to regions of space, moments in time, specific visual features, individual objects, and even specific high-level categories-for example, when keeping an eye out for dogs while jogging. Here, we exploited visual periodicity to examine how category-based attention differentially modulates selective neural processing of face and non-face categories. We combined electroencephalography with a novel frequency-tagging paradigm capable of capturing selective neural responses for multiple visual categories contained within the same rapid image stream (faces/birds in Exp 1; houses/birds in Exp 2). We found that the pattern of attentional enhancement and suppression for face-selective processing is unique compared to other object categories: Where attending to non-face objects strongly enhances their selective neural signals during a later stage of processing (300-500 ms), attentional enhancement of face-selective processing is both earlier and comparatively more modest. Moreover, only the selective neural response for faces appears to be actively suppressed by attending towards an alternate visual category. These results underscore the special status that faces hold within the human visual system, and highlight the utility of visual periodicity as a powerful tool for indexing selective neural processing of multiple visual categories contained within the same image sequence.
观察者可以有选择地将注意力集中在空间区域、时间点、特定视觉特征、单个物体上，甚至是特定的高级类别上——例如，在慢跑时留意狗。在这里，我们利用视觉周期性来研究基于类别的注意力如何不同地调节对面部和非面部类别的选择性神经处理。我们结合了脑电图和一种新颖的频率标记范式，该范式能够在同一快速图像流中捕获多个视觉类别的选择性神经反应（实验 1 中的面部/鸟类；实验 2 中的房屋/鸟类）。我们发现，与其他物体类别相比，面部选择性处理的注意力增强和抑制模式是独特的：当注意非面部物体时，它们在处理的后期阶段会强烈增强其选择性神经信号（300-500 毫秒），而对面部选择性处理的注意力增强则更早且相对较弱。此外，只有对脸部的选择性神经反应似乎会被主动抑制，以便关注另一个视觉类别。这些结果强调了面部在人类视觉系统中的特殊地位，并突出了视觉周期性作为一种强大工具的实用性，用于索引同一图像序列中包含的多个视觉类别的选择性神经处理。
