: The concept of attention as central to human performance extends back to the start of experimental psychology, yet even a few years ago, it would not have been possible to outline in even a preliminary form a functional anatomy of the human attentional system. New developments in neuroscience have opened the study of higher cognition to physiological analysis, and have revealed a system of anatomical areas that appear to be basic to the selection of information for focal (conscious) processing. The importance of attention is its unique role in connecting the mental level of description of processes used in cognitive science with the anatomical level common in neuroscience. Sperry describes the central role that mental concepts play in understanding brain function. As is the case for sensory and motor systems of the brain, our knowledge of the anatomy of attention is incomplete. Nevertheless, we can now begin to identify some principles of organization that allow attention to function as a unified system for the control of mental processing. Although many of our points are still speculative and controversial, we believe they constitute a basis for more detailed studies of attention from a cognitive-neuroscience viewpoint. Perhaps even more important for furthering future studies, multiple methods of mental chronometry, brain lesions, electrophysiology, and several types of neuro-imaging have converged on common findings.

/pdf/the-attention-system-of-the-human-brain-w797wllpat.pdf

The Attention System of the Human Brain

Visual attention: The past 25 years

A Common Network of Functional Areas for Attention and Eye Movements

A unified theory of visual recognition and attentional selection is developed by integrating the biased-choice model for single-stimulus recognition (Luce, 1963; Shepard, 1957) with a choice model for selection from multielement displays (Bundesen, Pedersen, & Larsen, 1984) in a race model framework. Mathematically, the theory is tractable, and it specifies the computations necessary for selection. The theory is applied to extant findings from a broad range of experimental paradigms. The findings include effects of object integrality in selective report, number and spatial position of targets in divided-attention paradigms, selection criterion and number of distracters in focused-attention paradigms, delay of selection cue in partial report, and consistent practice in search. On the whole, the quantitative fits are encouraging.

A theory of visual attention.

http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~dayan/papers/yud2005.pdf

Uncertainty, neuromodulation, and attention.

When we expect important stimuli at a particular spatial location, how does our perceptual sensitivity change over space? Subjects were cued to expect a target stimulus at one location and then required to perform one of the following tasks at that and three other locations: luminance detection, brightness discrimination, orientation discrimination, or form discrimination. The analysis of subjects' performance according to signal detection theory revealed changes in both sensitivity and bias for each of these tasks. Sensitivity was maximally enhanced at the location where a target stimulus was expected and generally decreased with distance from that location. Factors that influenced the gradient of sensitivity were (a) the type of task performed and (b) the spatial distribution of the stimuli. Sensitivity fell off more steeply over distance for orientation and form discrimination than for luminance detection and brightness discrimination. In addition, it fell off more steeply when stimuli were near each other than when they were farther apart.

Expectancy and visual-spatial attention: effects on perceptual quality

The mechanism by which visual-spatial attention affects the detection of faint signals has been the subject of considerable debate. It is well known that spatial cuing speeds signal detection. This may imply that attentional cuing modulates the processing of sensory information during detection or, alternatively, that cuing acts to create decision bias favoring input at the cued location. These possibilities were evaluated in 3 spatial cuing experiments. Peripheral cues were used in Experiment 1 and central cues were used in Experiments 2 and 3. Cuing similarly enhanced measured sensitivity, P(A) and d', for simple luminance detection in all 3 experiments. Under some conditions it also induced shifts in decision criteria (beta). These findings indicate that visual-spatial attention facilitates the processing of sensory input during detection either by increasing sensory gain for inputs at cued locations or by prioritizing the processing of cued inputs.

/pdf/visual-attention-modulates-signal-detectability-46op73dkoh.pdf

Cathryn J. Downing

Papers

Expectancy and visual-spatial attention: effects on perceptual quality

Visual attention modulates signal detectability.