Visual Feature Perception and Neural Representations During Shifts of Attention

Résumé du livre

The environment presents more information than we can fully process at a time. We rely on visual attention to prioritize and enhance the process of behaviorally relevant stimuli. To deal with real world challenges, visual attention is rarely static, instead dynamically shifting and splitting across spatial locations, objects and features. How does dynamic visual attention interact with visual perception to form our integrated visual experience? In this dissertation, I presented three studies to investigate the role of attention in processing the visual input from dynamic perspective. In Chapter 2, I demonstrated that involuntary shift of attention (captured by the distractor) could lead to two types of feature-binding errors (swapping errors and repulsion errors), indicating during the process of attentional shifts, the updates of location and feature information could be vulnerable and not perfect. In Chapter 3, I used EEG and Inverted Encoding Model to directly track the updates of location and feature information during attentional shifts. The results indicated the potential temporal link between location and feature updates across shift of attention. In Chapter 4, using fMRI, I successfully reconstructed task- relevant features in a multi-feature multi-object display from occipital and parietal brain regions. The results highlighted the role of attention to select the task-relevant information over the task-irrelevant information. In Chapter 5, I discussed the general implications of this dissertation and future directions. Overall, the studies in this dissertation emphasized the role of focused spatial attention in the processing of integrating features and locations into a cohesive visual world. It also provided useful tools to study the feature and location representations in a variety of dynamic cognitive process.