When size matters: attention affects performance by contrast or response gain

By Katrin Herrmann, Leila Montaser-Kouhsari, Marisa Carrasco, David J. Heeger. 2010

337 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Covert attention, the selective processing of visual information in the absence of eye movements, improves behavioral performance. We found that attention, both exogenous (involuntary) and endogenous (voluntary), can affect performance by contrast or response gain changes, depending on the stimulus size and the relative size of the attention field. These two variables were manipulated in a cueing task while stimulus contrast was varied. We observed a change in behavioral performance consonant with a change in contrast gain for small stimuli paired with spatial uncertainty and a change in response gain for large stimuli presented at one location (no uncertainty) and surrounded by irrelevant flanking distracters. A complementary neuroimaging experiment revealed that observers' attention fields were wider with than without spatial uncertainty. Our results support important predictions of the normalization model of attention and reconcile previous, seemingly contradictory findings on the effects of visual attention.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. R. V. Rullen
2. Thomas Miconi
3. Marisa Carrasco
4. Ali Borji
5. Jeff Clune
6. Laurent Itti

Citations in the corpus

• Theory of Mind: A Neural Prediction Problem (2013, neutral): “…cause better speed and accuracy of performance by increasing overall neural responses to attended stimuli (Feldman and Friston, 2010; Friston, 2010; Herrmann et al., 2010; Hillyard et al., 1998; Kok et al., 2012b; Martinez-Trujillo and Treue, 2004; Reynolds and Heeger, 2009; Treue and…”
• Visual attention: The past 25 years (2011, background): “(c and d) Small s attention is shown in b and d. Shown are plots of psychometric functions for each contrast yielding half-maximum performance; d0max, asymptotic performance at high nts are ±i.e. Error bars on parameter estimates are confidence intervals obtained by (Herrmann et al., 2010).”
• A Feedback Model of Attention Explains the Diverse Effects of Attention on Neural Firing Rates and Receptive Field Structure (2016, background): “However, we note that Herman and colleagues [38] estimated the effect of attention focused either on a fixed-position target, or to smaller targets with variable, unpredictable position.”