spatial and temporal dynamics of attentional guidance during inefficient visual search时空动态注意力指导在视觉搜索效率低下.pdfVIP

Spatial and Temporal Dynamics of Attentional Guidance during Inefficient Visual Search 1 2 ´ 2 1 Alexandre Zenon *, Suliann Ben Hamed , Jean-Rene Duhamel , Etienne Olivier ´ 1 Laboratory of Neurophysiology, Universite catholique de Louvain, Bruxelles, Belgium, 2 Institut des Sciences Cognitives, CNRS, Bron, France Abstract Spotting a prey or a predator is crucial in the natural environment and relies on the ability to extract quickly pertinent visual information. The experimental counterpart of this behavior is visual search (VS) where subjects have to identify a target amongst several distractors. In difficult VS tasks, it has been found that the reaction time (RT) is influenced by salience factors, such as the target-distractor similarity, and this finding is usually regarded as evidence for a guidance of attention by preattentive mechanisms. However, the use of RT measurements, a parameter which depends on multiple factors, allows only very indirect inferences about the underlying attentional mechanisms. The purpose of the present study was to determine the influence of salience factors on attentional guidance during VS, by measuring directly attentional allocation. We studied attention allocation by using a dual covert VS task in subjects who had 1) to detect a target amongst different items and 2) to report letters briefly flashed inside those items at different delays. As predicted, we showed that parallel processes guide attention towards the most relevant item by virtue of both goal-directed and stimulus-driven factors, and we demonstrated that this attentiona