Attentional Blink Effects on S-Cone Stimuli.

Xin Zhang,Haifeng Li,Feiming Li,Jun Wang,Lei Jia,Zhenghuan Mao,Hui Wang

doi:10.1177/2041669519830103

Abstract

This study aimed to compare attentional blink (AB) effects on S-cone and on luminance stimuli. Recent research had revealed considerable AB effects not only on high-order visual areas but also on low-order visual areas. Therefore, whether AB formation occurred or not at primary visual cortex must be examined. Previous studies had reported the absence of attention modulation in an early koniocellular pathway driven by S-cone stimuli; therefore, the AB effects on S-cone stimuli would be a strong piece of evidence for late-stage hypothesis at least in the koniocellular pathway. For this study, 12 participants were instructed to identify a centrally presented target (T1) only or to identify either T1 or a peripheral target (T2). The targets were either luminance or S-cone stimuli. As expected, comparable AB effects on S-cone and luminance stimuli were observed. Findings suggested that AB formation through a koniocellular pathway must occur at a later cortical processing stage.

Highlights

The formation of attentional blink (AB) is frequently attributed to a slow and capacity-limited attention stage of a two-stage visual processing model (Broadbent & Broadbent, 1987; Chun & Potter, 1995). In this later processing stage, limited attention resources prevent consciously reporting T2 after detecting T1, both T1 and T2 enter initial unconscious and rapid item categorization stage. Supporting evidence for this theory comes from a behavior fact that T2 can be successfully reported if T1 is ignored; electrophysiological (Dellacqua, Doro, Dux, Losier, & Jolicoeur, 2016; Luck, Vogel, & Shapiro, 1996; Maloney, Jayakumar, Levichkina, Pigarev, & Vidyasagar, 2013; Vogel, Luck, & Shapiro, 1998) and functional magnetic resonance imaging findings (Johnston, Linden, & Shapiro, 2012; Marcantoni, Lepage, Beaudoin, Bourgouin, & Richer, 2003; Marois, Yi, & Chun, 2004) suggest that a working memory (WM) load-dependent modulation of neural responses commonly occurs at the fronto-parietal brain regions during AB formation
We conducted a 2 (Trial Types: short-SOA trials vs. long-SOA trials) Â 2 (T2 in Different Tasks: T2_dual vs. T2_single) nonparametric Friedman two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) by ranks test on the thresholds of S-cone and luminance stimuli, respectively
The absence of significant masking indexes determined a possible confounding factor that is attributed to the AB effects reported here

Summary

Introduction

In this later processing stage, limited attention resources prevent consciously reporting T2 after detecting T1, both T1 and T2 enter initial unconscious and rapid item categorization stage Supporting evidence for this theory comes from a behavior fact that T2 can be successfully reported if T1 is ignored; electrophysiological (Dellacqua, Doro, Dux, Losier, & Jolicoeur, 2016; Luck, Vogel, & Shapiro, 1996; Maloney, Jayakumar, Levichkina, Pigarev, & Vidyasagar, 2013; Vogel, Luck, & Shapiro, 1998) and functional magnetic resonance imaging findings (Johnston, Linden, & Shapiro, 2012; Marcantoni, Lepage, Beaudoin, Bourgouin, & Richer, 2003; Marois, Yi, & Chun, 2004) suggest that a working memory (WM) load-dependent modulation of neural responses commonly occurs at the fronto-parietal brain regions during AB formation. All these evidence support a WM-based bottleneck and limited attention resources in the later processing stage

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Conclusion