Bottom-up Attention Research Articles

Me, You, and T: The effects of prenatal and endogenous testosterone on empathic abilities

The neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) may facilitate attention to social stimuli by influencing early stage bottom-up processing although findings in relation to different emotional expressions are inconsistent and its influence on top-down cognitive processing mechanisms unclear. In the current double-blind placebo (PLC) controlled between-subject design study we therefore recruited 71 male subjects (OXT = 34, PLC = 37) to investigate the effects of intranasal OXT (24IU) on both bottom-up attention allocation and top-down attention inhibition using a prosaccade and antisaccade paradigm incorporating social (neutral, happy, fearful, sad, angry faces) and non-social (oval shape) visual stimuli with concurrent eye movement acquisition. Results revealed a marginal significant interaction effect between treatment, condition and task (p = 0.054), with Bonferroni-corrected post-hoc tests indicating that OXT specifically increased antisaccade errors for social stimuli (ps < 0.04, effect sizes 0.46-0.88), but not non-social stimuli. Antisaccades are under volitional control and therefore this may indicate that OXT treatment reduced top-down inhibition. However, the overall findings are consistent with OXT acting to reduce top-down control of attention as a result of increasing bottom-up early attentional processing of social, but not non-social, stimuli in situations where the two systems are in potential conflict. Marked deficits in bottom-up attention allocation to social stimuli have been reported in autism spectrum disorder, within this context OXT may have the potential to increase early attention allocation towards social cues.

ISPNE Opening Plenary: Creating lasting memories – Involvement of stress hormones and amygdala activation: Time: Thursday, 06/Sep/2018: 3:30pm–4:15pm

The neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) may facilitate attention to social stimuli by influencing early stage bottom-up processing although findings in relation to different emotional expressions are inconsistent and its influence on top-down cognitive processing mechanisms unclear. In the current double-blind placebo (PLC) controlled between-subject design study we therefore recruited 71 male subjects (OXT = 34, PLC = 37) to investigate the effects of intranasal OXT (24IU) on both bottom-up attention allocation and top-down attention inhibition using a prosaccade and antisaccade paradigm incorporating social (neutral, happy, fearful, sad, angry faces) and non-social (oval shape) visual stimuli with concurrent eye movement acquisition. Results revealed a marginal significant interaction effect between treatment, condition and task (p = 0.054), with Bonferroni-corrected post-hoc tests indicating that OXT specifically increased antisaccade errors for social stimuli (ps < 0.04, effect sizes 0.46-0.88), but not non-social stimuli. Antisaccades are under volitional control and therefore this may indicate that OXT treatment reduced top-down inhibition. However, the overall findings are consistent with OXT acting to reduce top-down control of attention as a result of increasing bottom-up early attentional processing of social, but not non-social, stimuli in situations where the two systems are in potential conflict. Marked deficits in bottom-up attention allocation to social stimuli have been reported in autism spectrum disorder, within this context OXT may have the potential to increase early attention allocation towards social cues.

Using Visual Salience in Empirical Game Theory

“Bottom-up” visual perception is fast, universal, and does not depend on personal goals or experience. Where exactly bottom-up attention is directed in a visual image-- usually based on contrast, color, feature orientation, and centrality-- can be accurately predicted by machine-learned algorithms. We test whether this type of salience can help explain economic decisions in four experimental analyses (three are new). When people pick between sets of valued fruits, salience can lead to mistakes (lower-value sets are sometimes chosen because they are salient). Two studies show strong and weak influence on choices, respectively, of salience in stock price charts and salient payoffs in game matrices. The central analysis is evidence from games in which choices are locations in images. When players are trying to cooperatively match locations, concentration of salience is associated with the success of matching (r=.57). In competitive hider-seeker location games, all players choose salient locations more often. This fact creates a “seeker’s advantage” (9% wins compared to the 7% predicted by unique equilibrium). The location game data are consistent with cognitive hierarchy and level-k models in which predicted salience influences nonstrategic level-0 choices. Model estimates from hider-seeker games can predict behavior in matching games despite their opposite strategic structures. Looking forward, bottom-up salience could be included as a predictable type of costless involuntary “pre-attention” in expanded models of Bayesian-rational inattention. Novel applications involving prices and taxes, disability, ethnic markers, and visually-influenced beliefs are suggested.

Bio-inspired visual attention process using spiking neural networks controlling a camera

This study introduces virtual and physical implementations of a bottom-up visual attention mechanism using a spiking neural network (SNN) controlling a camera. The SNN is able to focus simple stimuli of various lengths that appear randomly in the camera's view. This is accomplished with an overt process based on a competitive choice according to a stimulus quadrant location. After focusing a selected stimulus toward the centre of its view, the SNN scans it from one edge to the other. Since the spike train of dedicated neurons reflects the duration of each scan, it allows the extraction of the stimulus length. Upon the completion of a scan, the SNN has the ability to switch to another stimulus. This preliminary work on spatial visual attention intends to be a step toward the study of the concept size learning process in a robotic context.

Alzheimer's disease patients activate attention networks in a short-term memory task.

Network functioning during cognitive tasks is of major interest in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Cognitive functioning in AD includes variable performance in short-term memory (STM). In most studies, the verbal STM functioning in AD patients has been interpreted within the phonological loop subsystem of Baddeley's working memory model. An alternative account considers that domain-general attentional processes explain the involvement of frontoparietal networks in verbal STM beside the functioning of modality-specific subsystems. In this study, we assessed the functional integrity of the dorsal attention network (involved in task-related attention) and the ventral attention network (involved in stimulus-driven attention) by varying attentional control demands in a STM task. Thirty-five AD patients and twenty controls in the seventies performed an fMRI STM task. Variation in load (five versus two items) allowed the dorsal (DAN) and ventral attention networks (VAN) to be studied. ANOVA revealed that performance decreased with increased load in both groups. AD patients performed slightly worse than controls, but accuracy remained above 70% in all patients. Statistical analysis of fMRI brain images revealed DAN activation for high load in both groups. There was no between-group difference or common activation for low compared to high load conditions. Psychophysiological interaction showed a negative relationship between the DAN and the VAN for high versus low load conditions in patients. In conclusion, the DAN remained activated and connected to the VAN in mild AD patients who succeeded in performing an fMRI verbal STM task. DAN was necessary for the task, but not sufficient to reach normal performance. Slightly lower performance in early AD patients compared to controls might be related to maintained bottom-up attention to distractors, to decrease in executive functions, to impaired phonological processing or to reduced capacity in serial order processing.

基于先前选择经验的注意偏向——一种自下而上的注意加工机制

基于先前选择经验的注意偏向——一种自下而上的注意加工机制

Neural evidence for persistent attentional bias to threats in patients with social anxiety disorder.

Does the biased attention toward social threats dwells on or disappears in patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD)? We investigated the neural mechanism of attentional bias in terms of attentional capture and holding in SAD. A total of 31 SAD patients and 30 healthy controls performed a continuous performance task detecting the orientation of a red letter ‘T’ while angry or neutral face distractors appeared or disappeared at the center of the screen. Behaviorally, typical attentional capture effects were found in response to abruptly appearing distractors in both groups. The patient group showed significant attentional dwelling effects in response to the angry face distractor only. Patients showed increased neural activity in the amygdala, insula/inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) compared with those of controls for the abruptly appearing angry distractor. Patients also maintained increased activities in brain regions related to attentional reorienting to distractor, namely the TPJ and IFG in line with their behavioral results of attentional holding effects. Our results indicate that patients with SAD showed prolonged attentional bias to task-irrelevant social threats. The underlying mechanism of prolonged attentional bias in SAD was indicated with amygdala hyperactivity and continued activity of the bottom-up attention network including the TPJ and IFG.

Cue predictability does not modulate bottom-up attentional capture.

Attention can be involuntarily captured by physically salient stimuli, a phenomenon known as bottom-up attention. Typically, these salient stimuli occur unpredictably in time and space. Therefore, in a series of three behavioural experiments, we investigated the extent to which such bottom-up attentional capture is a function of one's prior expectations. In the context of an exogenous cueing task, we systematically manipulated participants' spatial (Experiment 1) or temporal (Experiments 2 and 3) expectations about an uninformative cue and examined the amount of attentional capture by the cue. We anticipated larger attentional capture for unexpected compared to expected cues. However, while we observed attentional capture, we did not find any evidence for a modulation of attentional capture by prior expectation. This suggests that bottom-up attentional capture does not appear modulated by the degree to which the cue is expected or surprising.

The influence of temporal structure on visual search: How prediction shapes top-down and bottom-up attention

The influence of temporal structure on visual search: How prediction shapes top-down and bottom-up attention

The Functional Alterations in Top-Down Attention Streams of Parkinson\u2019s disease Measured by EEG

Early and moderate Parkinson’s disease patients seem to have attention dysfunctions manifested differentially in separate attention streams: top-down and bottom-up. With a focus on the neurophysiological underpinnings of such differences, this study evaluated source-localized regional activity and functional connectivity of regions in the top-down and bottom-up streams as well as any discordance between the two streams. Resting state electroencephalography was used for 36 Parkinson’s disease patients and 36 healthy controls matched for age and gender. Parkinson’s disease patients showed disproportionally higher bilateral gamma activity in the bottom-up stream and higher left alpha2 connectivity in the top-down stream when compared to age-matched controls. An additional cross-frequency coupling analysis showed that Parkinson’s patients have higher alpha2-gamma coupling in the right posterior parietal cortex, which is part of the top-down stream. Higher coupling in this region was also associated with lower severity of motor symptoms in Parkinson’s disease. This study provides evidence that in Parkinson’s disease, the activity in gamma frequency band and connectivity in alpha2 frequency band is discordant between top-down and bottom-up attention streams.

Bottom-up attention capture with distractor and target singletons defined in the same (color) dimension is not a matter of feature uncertainty

In visual search, attention capture by an irrelevant color-singleton distractor in another feature dimension than the target is dependent on whether or not the distractor changes its feature: Capture is present if the irrelevant color distractor can take on different features across trials, but absent if the distractor takes on only one feature throughout all trials. This influence could be due to down-weighting of the entire color map. Here we tested whether a similar effect could also be brought about by down-weighting of specific color channels within the same maps. We investigated whether a similar dependence of capture on color certainty might hold true if the distractor were defined in the same (color) dimension as the target. At odds with this possibility, in the first and third blocks—in which feature uncertainty was absent—an irrelevant distractor of a certain color captured attention. In addition, in a second block, varying the distractor color created feature uncertainty, but this did not increase capture. Repeating the exact same procedure with the same participants after one week confirmed the stability of the results. The present study showed that a color distractor presented in the same (color) dimension as the target captures attention independent of feature uncertainty. Thus, the down-weighting of single irrelevant color channels within the same feature map used for target search is not a matter of feature uncertainty.

Attention and Perceptual Learning Interact in the Development of the Other-Race Effect

Face-processing abilities are biased such that some faces are differentiated, recognized, and identified more readily than others. Across the first year of life, experience with faces shapes the development of face-processing biases. However, the developmental trajectory of face processing and important contributing factors are not well understood. In order to better characterize the development of face processing during infancy, we propose a model involving repeated interactions between attention and perceptual learning. This interactive framework predicts that bottom-up attention orienting to faces leads to rapid perceptual learning about frequently experienced faces, top-down selective-attention biases for familiar faces, and increasingly refined neural representations across the first year of life.

18.3 DISTURBED AND INTACT ATTENTIONAL PROCESSES DURING WORKING MEMORY ENCODING IN SCHIZOPHRENIA: CONVERGING BEHAVIORAL AND IMAGING GENETICS EVIDENCE

BackgroundWorking memory and attention are fundamental and closely linked cognitive domains. This close link is exemplified by the crucial role of selective attention for the selection of information to be encoded into working memory. Patients with schizophrenia are markedly impaired in many aspects of both domains. However, the interplay between these cognitive deficits on both the cognitive and neurophysiological level remains poorly understood. Based on our previous findings regarding the central role of impaired working memory encoding to working memory dysfunction in schizophrenia, we hypothesize, that impaired attentional processes contribute to working memory dysfunction specifically during the encoding stage. This hypothesis was tested in both a behavioral experiment and in an fMRI imaging genetics study.MethodsFor the behavioral study, we investigated 35 patients with schizophrenia and 35 matched healthy controls. In a change detection task, participants were simultaneously presented with both highly salient and non-salient spatial information. They were instructed to encode either the highly salient or the non-salient information. In half of the conditions, they were aided by a cue pointing them towards the relevant information. Our goal was to test, whether patients with schizophrenia were biased toward a particular type of information and whether a top-down cue would influence such a bias. In the imaging genetics study, we investigated 100 right-handed individuals without personal or family history of psychiatric disorders, who performed a visuospatial change detection task. The fMRI data were preprocessed and analyzed using Brain Voyager QX 20. For genotyping we used a custom Illumina HumanCoreExome-24 BeadChip array. We calculated polygenic scores (PGS) for schizophrenia based on 108 loci associated with schizophrenia in a recent mega-analysis of the Psychiatric Genetic Consortium (PGC2). We computed whole brain correlations between BOLD activation and PGS to elucidate the relationship between genetic risk for schizophrenia and abnormal brain function.ResultsIn the behavioral study, patients were significantly more impaired when required to encode non-salient compared to salient information. However, this impairment was specific to conditions without a top-down cue. This demonstrates, that patients could use top-down attention to overcome a bottom-up bias towards highly salient information during working memory encoding. In the fMRI data, we observed a significant negative correlation between BOLD activation in the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) during working memory encoding and PGS for schizophrenia. Across all subjects, this area showed robust deactivation during encoding. The TPJ is a crucial region of the ventral attention network and is closely involved in bottom-up attentional processes. Previous fMRI studies observed stronger deactivation of the TPJ during working memory encoding with increasing cognitive demand. Therefore, our results indicate that participants with a higher genetic risk for schizophrenia had to commit more cognitive resources by downregulating their ventral attention network.DiscussionTaken together, the results of both studies point toward specific disturbance of bottom-up attention during working memory encoding, which might be linked to genetic risk for schizophrenia. Conversely, top-down attention appears to be relatively spared. These findings provide new constraints for cognitive and neurophysiological models of impaired working memory encoding in schizophrenia.

The effects of association strength on attention and product evaluation

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to test whether endorsements that show a low strength of association (bottom-up bias) benefit from increased attention and processing efforts. The current study also tested whether consumer involvement level (top-down bias) dynamically interacts with the bottom-up attention phenomena.Design/methodology/approachThrough a series of pretests, 36 potential celebrity-product matches were identified using real athletes and product brands. Two experiments were conducted: 330 individual responses (110 participants × three conditions) were obtained in a within-subjects lab experiment, and 868 participants were recruited for a between-subjects online experiment. Linear mixed modeling and moderated mediation analysis were performed.FindingsThe relationships between the strength of image associations and attention time to endorsements and recall and choice consideration of endorsed brands were U-shaped and curvilinear. Attention largely mediated the relationship between the strength of association and recall/choice. Involvement effects were diluted by the strength of association effects, rejecting top-down attentional control.Practical implicationsBrand managers for both products and celebrities are recommended to search for corresponding not only image-matched partners but also endorsement partners with dissonant pre-existing images.Originality/valueThe majority of the existing endorsement literature has conventionally suggested that congruence between the endorser and the endorsed property, rather than incongruence, induces consumers’ positive endorsement evaluation. This study constructs important theoretical advancements to the existing literature by empirically proving that through an attentional process, an endorsement contract, conventionally perceived as mismatched, can also generate positive outcomes.

Interactions between top-down and bottom-up attention in barn owls (Tyto alba).

Selective attention, the prioritization of behaviorally relevant stimuli for behavioral control, is commonly divided into two processes: bottom-up, stimulus-driven selection and top-down, task-driven selection. Here, we tested two barn owls in a visual search task that examines attentional capture of the top-down task by bottom-up mechanisms. We trained barn owls to search for a vertical Gabor patch embedded in a circular array of differently oriented Gabor distractors (top-down guided search). To track the point of gaze, a lightweight wireless video camera was mounted on the owl's head. Three experiments were conducted in which the owls were tested in the following conditions: (1) five distractors; (2) nine distractors; (3) five distractors with one distractor surrounded by a red circle; or (4) five distractors with a brief sound at the initiation of the stimulus. Search times and number of head saccades to reach the target were measured and compared between the different conditions. It was found that search time and number of saccades to the target increased when the number of distractors was larger (condition2) and when an additional irrelevant salient stimulus, auditory or visual, was added to the scene (conditions3 and 4). These results demonstrate that in barn owls, bottom-up attention interacts with top-down attention to shape behavior in ways similar to human attentional capture. The findings suggest similar attentional principles in taxa that have been evolutionarily separated for 300 million years.

Neural Mechanisms of Episodic Retrieval Support Divergent Creative Thinking.

Prior research has indicated that brain regions and networks that support semantic memory, top-down and bottom-up attention, and cognitive control are all involved in divergent creative thinking. Kernels of evidence suggest that neural processes supporting episodic memory-the retrieval of particular elements of prior experiences-may also be involved in divergent thinking, but such processes have typically been characterized as not very relevant for, or even a hindrance to, creative output. In the present study, we combine functional magnetic resonance imaging with an experimental manipulation to test formally, for the first time, episodic memory's involvement in divergent thinking. Following a manipulation that facilitates detailed episodic retrieval, we observed greater neural activity in the hippocampus and stronger connectivity between a core brain network linked to episodic processing and a frontoparietal brain network linked to cognitive control during divergent thinking relative to an object association control task that requires little divergent thinking. Stronger coupling following the retrieval manipulation extended to a subsequent resting-state scan. Neural effects of the episodic manipulation were consistent with behavioral effects of enhanced idea production on divergent thinking but not object association. The results indicate that conceptual frameworks should accommodate the idea that episodic retrieval can function as a component process of creative idea generation, and highlight how the brain flexibly utilizes the retrieval of episodic details for tasks beyond simple remembering.

Joint Learning of Binocularly Driven Saccades and Vergence by Active Efficient Coding.

This paper investigates two types of eye movements: vergence and saccades. Vergence eye movements are responsible for bringing the images of the two eyes into correspondence, whereas saccades drive gaze to interesting regions in the scene. Control of both vergence and saccades develops during early infancy. To date, these two types of eye movements have been studied separately. Here, we propose a computational model of an active vision system that integrates these two types of eye movements. We hypothesize that incorporating a saccade strategy driven by bottom-up attention will benefit the development of vergence control. The integrated system is based on the active efficient coding framework, which describes the joint development of sensory-processing and eye movement control to jointly optimize the coding efficiency of the sensory system. In the integrated system, we propose a binocular saliency model to drive saccades based on learned binocular feature extractors, which simultaneously encode both depth and texture information. Saliency in our model also depends on the current fixation point. This extends prior work, which focused on monocular images and saliency measures that are independent of the current fixation. Our results show that the proposed saliency-driven saccades lead to better vergence performance and faster learning in the overall system than random saccades. Faster learning is significant because it indicates that the system actively selects inputs for the most effective learning. This work suggests that saliency-driven saccades provide a scaffold for the development of vergence control during infancy.

Effects of ensemble and summary displays on interpretations of geospatial uncertainty data

Ensemble and summary displays are two widely used methods to represent visual-spatial uncertainty; however, there is disagreement about which is the most effective technique to communicate uncertainty to the general public. Visualization scientists create ensemble displays by plotting multiple data points on the same Cartesian coordinate plane. Despite their use in scientific practice, it is more common in public presentations to use visualizations of summary displays, which scientists create by plotting statistical parameters of the ensemble members. While prior work has demonstrated that viewers make different decisions when viewing summary and ensemble displays, it is unclear what components of the displays lead to diverging judgments. This study aims to compare the salience of visual features – or visual elements that attract bottom-up attention – as one possible source of diverging judgments made with ensemble and summary displays in the context of hurricane track forecasts. We report that salient visual features of both ensemble and summary displays influence participant judgment. Specifically, we find that salient features of summary displays of geospatial uncertainty can be misunderstood as displaying size information. Further, salient features of ensemble displays evoke judgments that are indicative of accurate interpretations of the underlying probability distribution of the ensemble data. However, when participants use ensemble displays to make point-based judgments, they may overweight individual ensemble members in their decision-making process. We propose that ensemble displays are a promising alternative to summary displays in a geospatial context but that decisions about visualization methods should be informed by the viewer’s task.

The effect of cue frequency on bottom-up attention

The effect of cue frequency on bottom-up attention

Selective functional dysconnectivity of the dorsal-anterior subregion of the precuneus in drug-naive major depressive disorder

BackgroundPatients with major depressive disorder (MDD) have shown altered resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) of the precuneus; however, it is unknown whether rsFC of the precuneus subregions is differentially affected in this disorder. MethodsIn this study, we aimed to clarify this issue by comparing rsFC of each precuneus subregion between patients with MDD and healthy controls. Forty-seven drug-naive patients with MDD and 47 sex-, age- and education-matched healthy controls underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The precuneus was divided into PCun-1 (dorsal-central portion; medial area 7), PCun-2 (dorsal-anterior portion; medial area 5), PCun-3 (dorsal-posterior portion; dorsomedial parietooccipital sulcus) and PCun-4 (ventral portion; area 31). The rsFC of each precuneus subregion was compared between the two groups. ResultsCompared with healthy controls, patients with MDD exhibited increased rsFC between the left PCun-2 and the right fusiform gyrus, lateral prefrontal cortex, sensorimotor cortex and supramarginal gyrus. No significant inter-group difference was observed in the rsFC of other precuneus subregions. In addition, there was no difference in gray matter volume of all the precuneus subregions between patients with MDD and healthy controls. LimitationsSome of the patients had chronic MDD and relevant neuropsychological data were not collected. ConclusionsThese findings suggest a selective functional dysconnectivity of the precuneus subregions in drug-naive MDD, characterized by the hyperconnnectivity between the dorsal-anterior subregion and regions involved in visual, executive control, sensorimotor and bottom-up attention functions.