The role of different cues in the brain mechanism on visual spatial attention

Abstract

The visual spatial attention mechanism in the brain was studied in 16 young subjects through the visual search paradigm of precue-target by the event-related potential (ERP) technique, with the attentive ranges cued by different scales of Chinese character and region cues. The results showed that the response time for Chinese character cues was much longer than that for region cues especially for small region cues. With the exterior interferences, the target stimuli recognition under region cues was much quicker than that under Chinese character cues. Compared with that under region cues, targets under Chinese character cues could lead to increase of the posterior P1, decrease of the N1 and increase of the P2. It should also be noted that the differences between region cues and Chinese character cues were affected by the interference types. Under exterior interferences, no significant difference was found between region cues and Chinese character cues; however, it was not the case under the interior interferences. Considering the difference between the exterior interferences and the interior interferences, we could conclude that with the increase of difficulty in target recognition there was obvious difference in the consumption of anterior frontal resources by target stimuli under the two kinds of cues.