Magnocellular and parvocellular influences on reflexive attention

► We show that magnocellular and parvocellular systems trigger attentional capture. ► This capture enhances both early sensory and later high-order neural processing. ► These enhancements are transient, occurring only at short cue to target intervals. ► These effects are not dependent on top-down co...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Vision research (Oxford) 2011-08, Vol.51 (16), p.1820-1828
Main Authors: Ries, Anthony J., Hopfinger, Joseph B.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Attention - physiology
Attention capture
Biological and medical sciences
Cues
Electroencephalography
ERP
Evoked Potentials, Visual - physiology
Eye and associated structures. Visual pathways and centers. Vision
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Involuntary
Male
P300
Photic Stimulation
Reaction Time - physiology
Vertebrates: nervous system and sense organs
Visual Pathways - physiology
Visual Perception - physiology
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Summary:► We show that magnocellular and parvocellular systems trigger attentional capture. ► This capture enhances both early sensory and later high-order neural processing. ► These enhancements are transient, occurring only at short cue to target intervals. ► These effects are not dependent on top-down control settings. ► These effects are not dependant on within-pathway priming. Previous studies have provided conflicting evidence regarding whether the magnocellular (M) or parvocellular (P) visual pathway is primarily responsible for triggering involuntary orienting. Here, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to provide new evidence that both the M and P pathways can trigger attentional capture and bias visual processing at multiple levels. Specifically, cued-location targets elicited enhanced activity, relative to uncued-location targets, at both early sensory processing levels (indexed by the P1 component) and later higher-order processing stages (as indexed by the P300 component). Furthermore, the present results show these effects of attentional capture were not contingent on the feature congruency between the cue and expected target, providing evidence that this biasing of visual processing was not dependant on top-down expectations or within-pathway priming.
ISSN:0042-6989
1878-5646
DOI:10.1016/j.visres.2011.06.012