Researchers, led by David Melcher of Oxford Brookes University and Zoltn Vidnynszky of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Semmelweis University, have developed an experimental technique for measuring the processing of visual input outside the focus of attention as a function of what subjects are concentrating on inside their attentional focus. Their technique will enhance study of this little-understood phenomenon, they said. The research is published in the June 2 issue of Neuron.
For example, they used their technique to show that, in the process of implicit attentional selection, different features of an object are automatically "clustered." For example, subjects asked to pay attention to a particular color also attend to the motion of objects of the same color throughout the visual field.
The researchers' technique consisted basically of asking subjects to pay attention to either of two separate populations of moving colored dots on a computer display. Asking the subjects to switch their attention from one set of dots to the other, the researchers manipulated the color and motion of the dots such that they could test how well the subjects discriminated one feature, say movement, while paying attention to another.
They were even able to manipulate the experiment so that subjects would misperceive that the color and motion were "misbound." In such circumstances, the subjects still linked features, indicating that such linkage reflected perception of actual relationships between the features and could not be "fooled."
The researchers also sought to understand the difference between the "binding" of features that are within the focus of attention from
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Cell Press
1-Jun-2005