Behavioral performance follows the time course of neural facilitation and suppression during cued shifts of feature-selective attention

A central question in the field of attention is whether visual processing is a strictly limited resource, which must be allocated by selective attention. If this were the case, attentional enhancement of one stimulus should invariably lead to suppression of unattended distracter stimuli. Here we exa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2010-08, Vol.107 (31), p.13878-13882
Main Authors: Andersen, S. K., Müller, M. M., Desimone, Robert
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Amplitude
Attention
Behavior - physiology
Behavioral neuroscience
Biological Sciences
Brain - physiology
Brain Mapping
Cognitive psychology
Correlations
Electrodes
Electroencephalography
Evoked potentials
Experimentation
Female
Humans
Male
Mental stimulation
Neurons
Neurosciences
Selective attention
Social Sciences
Time Factors
Visual cortex
Visual processing
Young Adult
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Summary:A central question in the field of attention is whether visual processing is a strictly limited resource, which must be allocated by selective attention. If this were the case, attentional enhancement of one stimulus should invariably lead to suppression of unattended distracter stimuli. Here we examine voluntary cued shifts of feature-selective attention to either one of two superimposed red or blue random dot kinematograms (RDKs) to test whether such a reciprocal relationship between enhancement of an attended and suppression of an unattended stimulus can be observed. The steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP), an oscillatory brain response elicited by the flickering RDKs, was measured in human EEG. Supporting limited resources, we observed both an enhancement of the attended and a suppression of the unattended RDK, but this observed reciprocity did not occur concurrently: enhancement of the attended RDK started at 220 ms after cue onset and preceded suppression of the unattended RDK by about 130 ms. Furthermore, we found that behavior was significantly correlated with the SSVEP time course of a measure of selectivity (attended minus unattended) but not with a measure of total activity (attended plus unattended). The significant deviations from a temporally synchronized reciprocity between enhancement and suppression suggest that the enhancement of the attended stimulus may cause the suppression of the unattended stimulus in the present experiment.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1002436107