Abstract
Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from subjects who attended to pairs of adjacent colored squares that were flashed sequentially to produce a perception of movement. The task was to attend selectively to stimuli in one visual field and to detect slower moving _targets that contained the critical value of the attended feature, be it color or movement direction. Attention to location was reflected by a modulation of the early P1 and N1 components of the ERP, whereas selection of the relevant stimulus feature was associated with later selection negativity components. ERP indices of feature selection were elicited only by stimuli at the attended location and had distinctive scalp distributions for features mediated by “ventral” (color) and “dorsal” (motion) cortical areas. ERP indices of _target selection were also contingent on the prior selection of location but initially did not depend on the selection of the relevant feature. These ERP data reveal the timing of sequential, parallel, and contingent stages of visual processing and support early-selection theories of attention that stipulate attentional control over the initial processing of stimulus features.
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This study was supported by Grant MH-25594 from the National Institute of Mental Health and Grant NS-17778 from the National Institutes of Health, by Contract N00014-89-J-1806 from the Office of Naval Research, and by a postdoctoral fellowship from the San Diego McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience to the first author.
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Anllo-Vento, L., Hillyard, S.A. Selective attention to the color and direction of moving stimuli: Electrophysiological correlates of hierarchical feature selection. Perception & Psychophysics 58, 191–206 (1996). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211875
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211875