Abstract
In the visual world, rapidly reorienting to relevant objects outside the focus of attention is vital for survival. This ability from the interaction between goal-directed and stimulus-driven attentional control is termed contingent reorienting. Neuroimaging studies have demonstrated activations of the ventral and dorsal attentional networks (DANs) which exhibit right hemisphere dominance, but the temporal dynamics of the attentional networks still remain unclear. The present study used event-related potential (ERP) to index the locus of spatial attention and Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) to acquire the time-frequency information during contingent reorienting. The ERP results showed contingent reorienting induced significant N2pc on both hemispheres. In contrast, our time-frequency analysis found further that, unlike the N2pc, theta oscillation during contingent reorienting differed between hemispheres and experimental sessions. The inter-trial coherence (ITC) of the theta oscillation demonstrated that the two sides of the attentional networks became phase-locked to contingent reorienting at different stages. The left attentional networks were associated with contingent reorienting in the first experimental session whereas the bilateral attentional networks play a more important role in this process in the subsequent session. This phase-locked information suggests a dynamic temporal evolution of the involvement of different attentional networks in contingent reorienting and a potential role of the left ventral network in the first session.
Highlights
Things that are of importance or immediate relevance capture our attention even when they appear out of the corner of our eyes
The inter-trial coherence (ITC) of theta band oscillation, which was phase-locked to the onset of contingent reorienting, demonstrated that the involvement of the two discrete attentional networks dynamically changed at different time points
While our event-related potential (ERP) results confirm that contingent reorienting was related to N2pc, the theta oscillation reveals that such contingent reorienting was modulated by visual fields and experimental sessions
Summary
Things that are of importance or immediate relevance capture our attention even when they appear out of the corner of our eyes. When we search for a friend wearing a red coat in a crowd, we can efficiently filter out people without this feature but may occasionally get distracted by someone with a red hat This phenomenon is an example of contingent capture, where the focus of attention is shifted to other objects that match the current goal of the observer (Folk et al, 1992, 2002; Theeuwes, 2010). Such a process is characterized as the results of involuntary attentional reorienting and the integration between top-down and stimulus-driven attentional control. This characteristic of rapidly reorienting to any object that shares a target-defining feature is, sometimes error-prone, an essential and advantageous aspect of attention which helps to increase the efficiency of visual search.
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