title: Pitting binding against selection--electrophysiological measures of feature-based attention are attenuated by Gestalt object grouping.
abstract: Humans have limited cognitive resources to process the nearly limitless information available in the environment. Endogenous, or 'top-down', selective attention to basic visual features such as color or motion is a common strategy for biasing resources in favor of the most relevant information sources in a given context. Opposing this top-down separation of features is a 'bottom-up' tendency to integrate, or bind, the various features that constitute objects. We pitted these two processes against each other in an electrophysiological experiment to test if top-down selective attention can overcome constitutive binding processes. Our results demonstrate that bottom-up binding processes can dominate top-down feature-based attention even when explicitly detrimental to task performance.
authors.affiliation: Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY 10461, USA.
authors.forename: Adam C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Snyder
authors.forename: Ian C
authors.initials: IC
authors.lastname: Fiebelkorn
authors.forename: John J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Foxe
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology*; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D055815:Young Adult