title: Space, color, and direction of movement: how do they affect attention?
abstract: Paying attention improves performance, but is this improvement regardless of what we attend to? We explored the differences in performance between attending to a location and attending to a feature when perceiving global motion. Attention was first cued to one of four locations that had coherently moving dots, while the remaining three had randomly moving distracter dots. Participants then viewed a colored display, wherein the color of the coherently moving dots was cued instead of location. In the third task, participants identified the location that had a particular cued direction of motion. Most observers reported reductions of motion threshold in all three tasks compared to when no cue was provided. However, the attentional bias generated by location cues was significantly larger than the bias resulting from feature cues of direction or color. This effect is consistent with the idea that attention is largely controlled by a fronto-parietal network where spatial relations are preferentially processed. On the other hand, color could not be used as a cue to focus attention and integrate motion. This finding suggests that color relies heavily on processing by ventral temporal cortical areas, which may have little control over the global motion areas in the dorsal part of the brain.
authors.affiliation: Department of Optometry & Vision Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia. verghese@unimelb.edu.au
authors.forename: Ashika
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Verghese
authors.forename: Andrew J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Anderson
authors.forename: Trichur R
authors.initials: TR
authors.lastname: Vidyasagar
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D012684:Sensory Thresholds / Q000502:physiology; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: feature-based attention; inferotemporal cortex; motion coherence; parietal cortex; spatial attention; visual attention