Grignolio Damiano, Meyyappan Sreenivasan, Geng Joy, Mangun George R, Hickey Clayton
Center for Human Brain Health and School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B60 2RU, UK.
Center for Mind and Brain and Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, CA 95618, USA.
bioRxiv. 2025 Jan 10:2025.01.09.632156. doi: 10.1101/2025.01.09.632156.
Selective attention is widely thought to be sensitive to visual objects. This is commonly demonstrated in cueing studies, which show that when attention is deployed to a known target location that happens to fall on a visual object, responses to targets that unexpectedly appear at other locations on that object are faster and more accurate, as if the object in its entirety has been visually prioritized. However, this notion has recently been challenged by results suggesting that putative object-based effects may reflect the influence of hemifield anisotropies in attentional deployment, or of unacknowledged influences of perceptual complexity and visual clutter. Studies employing measures of behaviour provide limited opportunity to address these challenges. Here, we used EEG to directly measure the influence of task-irrelevant objects on the deployment of visual attention. We had participants complete a simple visual cueing task involving identification of a target that appeared at either a cued location or elsewhere. Throughout each experimental trial, displays contained task-irrelevant rectangle stimuli that could be oriented horizontally or vertically. We derived two cue-elicited indices of attentional deployment-lateralized alpha oscillations and the ADAN component of the event-related potential-and found that these were sensitive to the otherwise irrelevant orientation of the rectangles. Our results demonstrate that the allocation of visual attention is influenced by objects boundaries, supporting models of object-based attentional prioritization.
人们普遍认为选择性注意对视觉对象敏感。这一点在提示研究中通常得到证实，这些研究表明，当注意力被部署到恰好落在一个视觉对象上的已知目标位置时，对意外出现在该对象其他位置的目标的反应会更快、更准确，就好像整个对象在视觉上都被优先处理了一样。然而，最近这一观点受到了挑战，研究结果表明，假定的基于对象的效应可能反映了注意部署中半视野各向异性的影响，或者是感知复杂性和视觉杂乱未被认识到的影响。采用行为测量方法的研究解决这些挑战的机会有限。在这里，我们使用脑电图直接测量任务无关对象对视觉注意部署的影响。我们让参与者完成一个简单的视觉提示任务，该任务涉及识别出现在提示位置或其他位置的目标。在每个实验过程中，显示屏上都包含任务无关的矩形刺激，这些刺激可以水平或垂直定向。我们得出了两个由提示引发的注意部署指标——偏侧化阿尔法振荡和事件相关电位的ADAN成分——并发现这些指标对矩形的其他无关定向很敏感。我们的结果表明，视觉注意的分配受到对象边界的影响，这支持了基于对象的注意优先模型。
