A psychophysical investigation into the preview benefit in visual search

In preview search, half of the distracters are presented ahead of the remaining distracters and the target. Search under these conditions is more efficient than when all the items appear together (Watson & Humphreys, 1997). We investigated the mechanisms contributing to this preview benefit using an orientation discrimination task. In a display of vertical Gabors (all equidistant from fixation) one Gabor (chosen at random) was tilted (left or right). When half the non-tilted Gabors were previewed, thresholds increased less with the number of Gabors. In a further experiment, orientation noise was added to some of the Gabors. When all Gabors were presented simultaneously, orientation thresholds for the target increased. The effects of noise on thresholds was reduced, however, when the noisy Gabors were presented as a preview. Furthermore, there was less effect of noise in the preview condition than when observers were cued to a subset of Gabors (with a cue presented prior to the Gabors, adjacent to their positions). Visual information can be effectively excluded from the previewed locations to a greater degree than when attention is directed to a subset of display items. The implications for understanding the mechanisms involved in preview search are discussed

The left intraparietal sulcus modulates the selection of low salient stimuli

Neuropsychological and functional imaging studies have suggested a general right hemisphere advantage for processing global visual information and a left hemisphere advantage for processing local information. In contrast, a recent transcranial magnetic stimulation study [Mevorach, C., Humphreys, G. W., & Shalev, L. Opposite biases in salience-based selection for the left and right posterior parietal cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 9, 740-742, 2006b] demonstrated that functional lateralization of selection in the parietal cortices on the basis of the relative salience of stimuli might provide an alternative explanation for previous results. In the present study, we applied a whole-brain analysis of the functional magnetic resonance signal when participants responded to either the local or the global levels of hierarchical figures. The task (respond to local or global) was crossed with the saliency of the target level (local salient, global salient) to provide, for the first time, a direct contrast between brain activation related to the stimulus level and that related to relative saliency. We found evidence for lateralization of salience-based selection but not for selection based on the level of processing. Activation along the left intraparietal sulcus (IPS) was found when a low saliency stimulus had to be selected irrespective of its level. A control task showed that this was not simply an effect of task difficulty. The data suggest a specific role for regions along the left IPS in salience-based selection, supporting the argument that previous reports of lateralized responses to local and global stimuli were contaminated by effects of saliency

The integration of occlusion and disparity information for judging depth in autism spectrum disorder

In autism spectrum disorder (ASD), atypical integration of visual depth cues may be due to flattened perceptual priors or selective fusion. The current study attempts to disentangle these explanations by psychophysically assessing within-modality integration of ordinal (occlusion) and metric (disparity) depth cues while accounting for sensitivity to stereoscopic information. Participants included 22 individuals with ASD and 23 typically developing matched controls. Although adults with ASD were found to have significantly poorer stereoacuity, they were still able to automatically integrate conflicting depth cues, lending support to the idea that priors are intact in ASD. However, dissimilarities in response speed variability between the ASD and TD groups suggests that there may be differences in the perceptual decision-making aspect of the task

Poor encoding of position by contrast-defined motion

Second-order (contrast-defined) motion stimuli lead to poor performance on a number of tasks, including discriminating form from motion and visual search. To investigate this deficiency, we tested the ability of human observers to monitor multiple regions for motion, to code the relative positions of shapes defined by motion, and to simultaneously encode motion direction and location. Performance with shapes from contrast-defined motion was compared with that obtained from luminance-defined (first-order) stimuli. When the position of coherent motion was uncertain, direction-discrimination thresholds were elevated similarly for both luminance-defined and contrast-defined motion, compared to when the stimulus location was known. The motion of both luminance- and contrast-defined structure can be monitored in multiple visual field locations. Only under conditions that greatly advantaged contrast-defined motion, were observers able to discriminate the positional offset of shapes defined by either type of motion. When shapes from contrast-defined and luminance-defined motion were presented under comparable conditions, the positional accuracy of contrast-defined motion was found to be poorer than its luminance-defined counterpart. These results may explain some, but possibly not all, of the deficits found previously with second-order motion

Active ignoring in early visual cortex

Selective attention is critical for controlling the input to mental processes. Attentional mechanisms act not only to select relevant stimuli but also to exclude irrelevant stimuli. There is evidence that we can actively ignore irrelevant information. We measured neural activity relating to successfully ignoring distracters (using preview search) and found increases in both the precuneus and primary visual cortex during preparation to ignore distracters. We also found reductions in activity in fronto-parietal regions while previewing distracters and a reduction in activity in early visual cortex during search when a subset of items was successfully excluded from search, both associated with precuneus activity. These results are consistent with the proposal that actively excluding distractions has two components: an initial stage where distracters are encoded, and a subsequent stage where further processing of these items is inhibited. Our findings suggest that it is the precuneus that controls this process and can modulate activity in visual cortex as early as V1

Decomposition of neural circuits of human attention using a model based analysis: sSoTs model application to fMRI data

The complex neural circuits found in fMRI studies of human attention were decomposed using a model of spiking neurons. The model for visual search over time and space (sSoTS) incorporates different synaptic components (NMDA, AMPA, GABA) and a frequency adaptation mechanism based on IAHP current. This frequency adaptation current can act as a mechanism that suppresses the previously attended items. It has been shown [1] that when the passive process (frequency adaptation) is coupled with a process of active inhibition, new items can be successfully prioritized over time periods matching those found in psychological studies. In this study we use the model to decompose the neural regions mediating the processes of active attentional guidance, and the inhibition of distractors, in search. Activity related to excitatory guidance and inhibitory suppression was extracted from the model and related to different brain regions by using the synaptic activation from sSoTS’s maps as regressors for brain activity derived from standard imaging analysis techniques. The results show that sSoTS pulls-apart discrete brain areas mediating excitatory attentional guidance and active distractor inhibition

Ventral extra-striate cortical areas are required for human visual texture segmentation

A patient (HJA) with bilateral occipital lobe damage to ventral cortical areas V2, V3 and V4 was tested on a texture segmentation task involving texture bar detection in an array of oriented lines. Performance detecting a target shape was assessed as the orientations of the background lines had increasing orientation noise. Control participants found the task easier when the background lines had the same orientation or only slightly shifted in orientation. HJA was poor with all backgrounds but particularly so when the background lines had the same or almost the same orientations. The results suggest that V1 alone is not sufficient to perform easy texture segmentation, even when the background of the display is a homogeneous texture. Ventral extra-striate cortical areas are needed in order to detect texture boundaries. We suggest that extra-striate visual areas enhance the borders between the target and background, while also playing a role in reducing the signal from homogeneous texture backgrounds

Editorial: perception and cognition: interactions in the ageing brain

Healthy ageing can lead to declines in both perceptual and cognitive functions. Many of the studies in this Topic demonstrate such age-related declines, but also identify links between them. Encouragingly, these links suggest that improving perception could benefit cognition. In addition, while compensatory cognitive strategies were mainly unsuccessful in improving perception, cognitive training was effective under certain condition

Psychophysical correlates of global motion processing in the aging visual system: a critical review

The consequences of visual decline in aging have a fundamental and wide-reaching impact on age-related quality of life. It is of concern therefore that evidence suggests that normal aging is accompanied by impairments in the ability to effectively encode global motion. Global motion perception is a fundamentally important process. It enables us to determine the overall velocity of spatially extensive objects in the world and provides us with information about our own body movements. Here, we review what is currently known about the effects of age on performance for encoding the global motion information available in random dot kinematograms (RDKs), a class of stimuli widely used to probe the mechanisms underlying motion perception. We conclude that age-related deficits in global motion perception are not all encompassing. Rather, they appear to be specific to certain stimulus conditions. We also examine evidence for an interaction between age and gender and consider the efficacy of techniques such as visual perceptual learning that may attenuate some of the visual deficits in the older adult population

The role of contrast sensitivity in global motion processing deficits in the elderly

This study compared the effects of age on the perception of translational, radial, and rotational global motion patterns. Motion coherence thresholds were measured for judging the direction of each motion type as a function of contrast (visibility) and temporal sampling rate in young and elderly participants. Coherence thresholds decreased as dot contrast increased asymptoting at high dot contrasts but were higher in elderly compared to young participants. This equated to global motion impairment in the elderly of a factor of around 2, characterized by a shift of the threshold vs. contrast function along the horizontal axes (dot contrast). The effect of contrast interacted with the temporal sampling rate. Old participants were deleteriously affected by reduced temporal sampling particularly at low contrasts. The findings suggest that age- related changes in global motion perception may be driven principally by deficits in contrast encoding, rather than by deficits in motion integration and suggest a role for increased internal noise in the older visual system