Attentional Selection of Feature Conjunctions Is Accomplished by Parallel and Independent Selection of Single Features

Overview

Journal J Neurosci

Specialty Neurology

Date 2015 Jul 10

PMID 26156992

Citations 16

Authors

Soren K Andersen

Matthias M Muller

Steven A Hillyard

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Significance Statement: The ability to perceive the world is limited by the brain's processing capacity. Attention affords adaptive behavior by selectively prioritizing processing of relevant stimuli based on their features (location, color, orientation, etc.). We found that attentional mechanisms for selection of different features belonging to the same object operate independently and in parallel: concurrent attentional selection of two stimulus features is simply the sum of attending to each of those features separately. This result is key to understanding attentional selection in complex (natural) scenes, where relevant stimuli are likely to be defined by a combination of stimulus features.

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