Behavioral and Brain Measures of Phasic Alerting Effects on Visual Attention.

Iris Wiegand,Jon Lansner,Thomas Habekost,Claus Bundesen,Kathrin Finke,Anders Petersen

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2017.00176

Abstract

In the present study, we investigated effects of phasic alerting on visual attention in a partial report task, in which half of the displays were preceded by an auditory warning cue. Based on the computational Theory of Visual Attention (TVA), we estimated parameters of spatial and non-spatial aspects of visual attention and measured event-related lateralizations (ERLs) over visual processing areas. We found that the TVA parameter sensory effectiveness a, which is thought to reflect visual processing capacity, significantly increased with phasic alerting. By contrast, the distribution of visual processing resources according to task relevance and spatial position, as quantified in parameters top-down control α and spatial bias windex, was not modulated by phasic alerting. On the electrophysiological level, the latencies of ERLs in response to the task displays were reduced following the warning cue. These results suggest that phasic alerting facilitates visual processing in a general, unselective manner and that this effect originates in early stages of visual information processing.

Highlights

Visual attention is the cognitive function that enables the observer to select and process information, which is crucial for behaving effectively in the visual environment
The ANOVA on mean scores revealed a main effect of Cue (F(1,17) = 55.68, p < 0.001; ηp2 = 0.76), reflecting that more targets were correctly identified when the display was preceded by a warning cue compared to when no cue was played
While we found that only the total amount of visual capacity was affected by phasic alerting, some previous Theory of Visual Attention (TVA)-based studies found diverse effects on the attentional parameters reflecting the relative distribution of processing resources

Summary

Introduction

Visual attention is the cognitive function that enables the observer to select and process information, which is crucial for behaving effectively in the visual environment. Attention consists of multiple components supported by partly overlapping, but independent structures within a large brain network spanning visual-sensory and fronto-parietal control areas (Posner and Boies, 1971; Desimone and Duncan, 1995; Corbetta and Shulman, 2002, 2011; Fan et al, 2005). Phasic alerting has been shown to reduce reaction times (RT) in response to various stimuli (Coull et al, 2001; Thiel and Fink, 2007) This RT benefit has originally been attributed to faster preparation and/or execution of motor processes (Posner, 1978; Sturm and Willmes, 2001); likely, alerting effects may originate in earlier sensory and attentional stages (Kusnir et al, 2011). Whether and how aspects of selective attention, besides the general increase in processing speed, vary with phasic alertness, is not well understood (Weinbach and Henik, 2012)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion