Abstract
Whether doing the shopping, or driving the car – to navigate daily life, our brain has to rapidly identify relevant color signals among distracting ones. Despite a wealth of research, how color attention is dynamically adjusted is little understood. Previous studies suggest that the speed of feature attention depends on the time it takes to enhance the neural gain of cortical units tuned to the attended feature. To test this idea, we had human participants switch their attention on the fly between unpredicted target color alternatives, while recording the electromagnetic brain response to probes matching the target, a non-target, or a distracting alternative target color. Paradoxically, we observed a temporally prioritized processing of distractor colors. A larger neural modulation for the distractor followed by its stronger attenuation expedited target identification. Our results suggest that dynamic adjustments of feature attention involve the temporally prioritized processing and elimination of distracting feature representations.
Highlights
Whether doing the shopping, or driving the car – to navigate daily life, our brain has to rapidly identify relevant color signals among distracting ones
Analyzing the brain response to the probe allowed us to assess the temporal evolution of the global feature-based attention (GFBA) response as a function of whether the color must be biased for target identification, or de-emphasized in favor of the presented target color on a given trial
The temporal development of color selectivity was tracked by recording the eventrelated potential (ERP) to simultaneously presented irrelevant color probes
Summary
Driving the car – to navigate daily life, our brain has to rapidly identify relevant color signals among distracting ones. Previous studies suggest that the speed of feature attention depends on the time it takes to enhance the neural gain of cortical units tuned to the attended feature. To test this idea, we had human participants switch their attention on the fly between unpredicted target color alternatives, while recording the electromagnetic brain response to probes matching the target, a non-target, or a distracting alternative target color. There may be an initial GFBA response for both the present (PC, red) and the distracting (DC, green) target color appearing with the same temporal onset. This suppression of the DC could already start at the onset of the GFBA response (green thin dashed)
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