Nonretinotopic Exogenous Attention.

© 2011 par chri_sti_an

Attention is captured by nonretinotopic, noninformative cues.

Attention is crucial for visual perception because it allows the visual system to effectively use its limited resources by selecting behaviorally and cognitively relevant stimuli from the large amount of information impinging on the eyes. Reflexive, stimulus-driven attention is essential for successful interactions with the environment because it can, for example, speed up responses to life-threatening events. It is commonly believed that exogenous attention operates in the retinotopic coordinates of the early visual system. Here, using a novel experimental paradigm, the group of Michael Herzog ( Laboratory of Psychophysics LPSY) show that a nonretinotopic cue improves both accuracy and reaction times in a visual search task. Furthermore, the influence of the cue is limited both in space and time, a characteristic typical of exogenous cueing. These and other recent findings show that many more aspects of vision are processed nonretinotopically than previously thought.

Marco Boi et al.,Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 20, Pages 1732-1737 (2011)