Abstract
Previous researches have widely demonstrated that the interference from peripheral distractor will decrease when the task load is high. However, no study to date has paid attention to the individual differences in perceptual load effect (PLE) and little is known of spontaneous brain activity associated with PLE during resting state. To investigate this issue, we used resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to examine the relationship between the amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (ALFFs) and PLE. The results showed that there were large individual differences in PLE and we found PLE was significantly associated with ALFFs in left inferior temporal gyrus (ITG) and left precentral/postcentral gyrus. The present study suggested that the PLE was measurable, and there were individual differences in this effect. Moreover, these results implicated that: 1) mutual competition for limited capacity, which is involved in visual attention, and 2) response control that is included in behavior response both may contribute to the modulation induced by perceptual load.
Highlights
It is very important to ignore irrelevant stimuli in life. ‘‘Early selection’’ and ‘‘late selection’’ models of attention, which have different views on role of attention in information processing, has led to a longstanding debate on attention theory (Driver, 2001)
Combining a modified visual search task and an expression calculating the modulation effect of perceptual load, we first evaluated the individual differences in perceptual load effect (PLE), and investigated the neural correlates of PLE through amplitude of low frequency fluctuation (ALFF)-behavior correlation analysis
The ALFF-behavior correlation analysis indicated that the ALFF values significantly correlated with the PLE in brain areas left IT gyrus (ITG) and left precentral/postcentral gyrus
Summary
It is very important to ignore irrelevant stimuli in life. ‘‘Early selection’’ and ‘‘late selection’’ models of attention, which have different views on role of attention in information processing, has led to a longstanding debate on attention theory (Driver, 2001). Perceptual load theory offers a proper resolution to this early and late selection debate, and clearly delineates the main determinants of successful focused attention and distractor ignorance: the level of perceptual load in current task (Lavie and Tsal, 1994; Lavie, 1995). According to perceptual load theory, perception has limited capacity and process automatically, in the low perceptual load tasks, any spare capacity not taken up in task-relevant stimuli will spill over involuntarily to task-irrelevant distractors, which lead to late selection. Tasks involving high perceptual load will run out full capacity on relevant stimuli, as a result irrelevant distractors have no chance to be perceived, which lead to early selection.
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