Serial deployment of attention during visual search.

By Geoffrey F. Woodman, Steven J. Luck. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2003

526 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study examined whether objects are attended in serial or in parallel during a demanding visual search task. A component of the event-related potential waveform, the N2pc wave, was used as a continuous measure of the allocation of attention to possible targets in the search arrays. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the relative allocation of attention shifts rapidly, favoring one item and then another. In Experiment 2, a paradigm was used that made it possible to track the absolute allocation of attention to individual items. This experiment showed that attention was allocated to one object for 100-150 ms before attention began to be allocated to the next object. These findings support models of attention that posit serial processing in demanding visual search tasks.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c6bfae8e52a99c913ed04315dfd7f7614aa1bb89

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Influence of cognitive control and mismatch on the N2 component of the ERP: a review. (2007, unknown): “…2006; Hickey, McDonald, & Theeuwes, 2006; Hopf et al., 2000; Hopf, Luck, et al., 2006; Luck & Hillyard, 1994a; Schubo, Wykowska, & Muller, 2007; Woodman & Luck, 1999, 2003) and attention to relevant stimulus features (selection negativity or SN; Anllo-Vento, Luck, & Hillyard, 1998; Eimer,…”
Dynamics of target selection in multiple object tracking (MOT). (2006, background): “…made for both points of view in search experiments (see, for example, Bricolo et al., 2002; Mordkoff and Egeth, 1993; Townsend and Wenger, 2004; Woodman and Luck, 2003) and we suspect that the argument will only be settled in the context of a broader theory that accounts for a greater range of…”
Electrophysiological Indices of Target and Distractor Processing in Visual Search (2009, background): “This is plausible because the N2pc is generally identified through the comparison of ipsilateral and contralateral waveforms elicited by the presentation of a balanced search display (e.g., Woodman & Luck, 1999, 2003; Luck & Ford, 1998; Eimer, 1996; Luck & Hillyard, 1994a, 1994b).”
Electrophysiological Evidence of the Capture of Visual Attention (2013, background): “This flip provides evidence for sequential shifts of attention to items on opposite sides of fixation (Woodman & Luck, 1999, 2003).”
Attentional control and capture in the attentional blink paradigm: Evidence from human electrophysiology (2006, methodology): “This latter measure was derived from the electrophysiological recordings and the event-related potential (ERP) technique that we used to isolate the N2pc component (Jolicœur, et al., in press; Luck & Hillyard, 1994; Woodman & Luck, 2003).”
Visual memory for natural scenes: Evidence from change detection and visual search (2006, background): “Similarly, visual search typically requires the serial allocation of attention to individual objects in the course of finding a target and rejecting distractors (Woodman & Luck, 2003).”
The Neural Site of Attention Matches the Spatial Scale of Perception (2006, methodology): “To determine the attention-related brain activity in the EEG/MEG data, we focused on the N2pc component, a well established correlate of the focusing of visuospatial attention (Luck and Hillyard, 1994; Luck et al., 1997a; Luck and Ford, 1998; Woodman and Luck, 1999, 2003).”
Attention effects during visual short-term memory maintenance: Protection or prioritization? (2007, methodology): “Blinks and eye movements (artifacts) were rejected through our standard two-step procedure (see Woodman & Luck, 2003).”