title: Attentional guidance relies on a winner-take-all mechanism.
abstract: The finding that attention can encompass several non-contiguous items at once challenges the current models of visual search based on a winner-take-all mechanism assuming the selection of a single object. It has been proposed instead that attentional guidance involves mechanisms selecting all relevant items simultaneously. In order to test this hypothesis, we studied attentional allocation during various visual search tasks. We confirmed that attention can indeed select several items concurrently but on the basis of their spatial relation, not relevance. This finding corroborates the view that during visual search, attentional guidance is based on a winner-take-all mechanism.
authors.affiliation: Université Catholique de Louvain, Institute of Neuroscience, Brussels, Belgium. zenon@salk.edu
authors.forename: Alexandre
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Zénon
authors.forename: Suliann
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ben Hamed
authors.forename: Jean-René
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Duhamel
authors.forename: Etienne
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Olivier
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011601:Psychophysics; D055815:Young Adult