Olfaction spontaneously highlights visual saliency map.
Attention is intrinsic to our perceptual representations of sensory inputs. Best characterized in the visual domain, it is typically depicted as a spotlight moving over a saliency map that topographically encodes strengths of visual features and feedback modulations over the visual scene. By introducing smells to two well-established attentional paradigms, the dot-probe and the visual-search paradigms, we find that a smell reflexively directs attention to the congruent visual image and facilitates visual search of that image without the mediation of visual imagery. Furthermore, such effect is independent of, and can override, top-down bias. We thus propose that smell quality acts as an object feature whose presence enhances the perceptual saliency of that object, thereby guiding the spotlight of visual attention. Our discoveries provide robust empirical evidence for a multimodal saliency map that weighs not only visual but also olfactory inputs.
Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, People's Republic of China, State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Beijing 100101, People's Republic of China.
Kepu
K
Chen
Bin
B
Zhou
Shan
S
Chen
Sheng
S
He
Wen
W
Zhou
D006801:Humans; D009812:Odorants; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D012903:Smell / Q000502:physiology*; D013268:Stimulation, Chemical; D014796:Visual Perception
attention; multi-sensory integration; olfaction; saliency map