Voluntary attention modulates processing of eye-specific visual information.
Visual attention functions to select relevant information from a vast amount of visual input that is available for further processing. Information from the two eyes is processed separately in early stages before converging and giving rise to a coherent percept. Observers normally cannot access eye-of-origin information. In the research reported here, we demonstrated that voluntary attention can be eye-specific, modulating visual processing within a specific monocular channel. Using a modified binocular-rivalry paradigm, we found that attending to a monocular cue while remaining oblivious to its eye of origin significantly enhanced the competition strength of a stimulus presented to the cued eye, even when the stimulus was suppressed from consciousness. Furthermore, this eye-specific attentional effect was insensitive to low-level properties of the cue (e.g., size and contrast) but sensitive to the attentional load. Together, these findings suggest that top-down attention can have a significant modulation effect at the eye-specific stage of visual information processing.
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA.
Peng
P
Zhang
Yi
Y
Jiang
Sheng
S
He
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D015348:Vision, Binocular; D015349:Vision, Monocular; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*