Visual attention: of features and transparent surfaces

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2007.08.012

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Volume 11, Issue 11, November 2007, Pages 451-453

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2007.08.012 Get rights and content

A recent report by Wannig et al. demonstrated the effects of selectively attending to individual surfaces in transparent motion patterns on neurons in the middle temporal area of awake, behaving monkeys. The study illustrates a highly adaptive and flexible attentional modulation of sensory responses.

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Cited by (10)

Visual attention: The past 25 years
2011, Vision Research
Citation Excerpt :
These results show that attention can select surface representations and modulate visual processing in area MT. A parsimonious account is that the response enhancement in this case pertained not to a single attended feature (direction of motion) but to an attended “surface” comprising a range of different features. Thus, the global spread of FBA may actually be guided by surface segmentation (Treue & Katzner, 2007). Neuroimaging studies requiring participants to attend to specific features of stimuli have revealed patterns of neural activity in human visual cortex that parallel the electrophysiological evidence for the spread of FBA to task-irrelevant locations.
This review focuses on covert attention and how it alters early vision. I explain why attention is considered a selective process, the constructs of covert attention, spatial endogenous and exogenous attention, and feature-based attention. I explain how in the last 25 years research on attention has characterized the effects of covert attention on spatial filters and how attention influences the selection of stimuli of interest. This review includes the effects of spatial attention on discriminability and appearance in tasks mediated by contrast sensitivity and spatial resolution; the effects of feature-based attention on basic visual processes, and a comparison of the effects of spatial and feature-based attention. The emphasis of this review is on psychophysical studies, but relevant electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies and models regarding how and where neuronal responses are modulated are also discussed.
Selective attention modulates electrical responses to reversals of optic-flow direction
2010, Vision Research
Attended stimuli typically evoke larger event-related potentials (ERPs) than unattended stimuli. We previously reported an exception when an optic-flow pattern is interleaved with stationary dots. Reversals of motion direction evoked a larger N200 peak when attention was directed to the stationary dots. We replicated and further characterized this result: the N200 enhancement was eliminated when the dots moved randomly rather than in optic flow. The effect was also attenuated with isoluminant stimuli. Electrical source analysis suggested the attentional modulation of a configuration of dorsal extrastriate generators. The ERP evoked by reversals of optic flow may reflect the operation of independently configurable attentional filters within visual cortex.
A model of neural mechanisms in monocular transparent motion perception
2010, Journal of Physiology Paris
Transparent motion is perceived when multiple motions are presented in the same part of visual space that move in different directions or with different speeds. Several psychophysical as well as physiological experiments have studied the conditions under which motion transparency occurs. Few computational mechanisms have been proposed that allow to segregate multiple motions. We present a novel neural model which investigates the necessary mechanisms underlying initial motion detection, the required representations for velocity coding, and the integration and segregation of motion stimuli to account for the perception of transparent motion. The model extends a previously developed architecture for neural computations along the dorsal pathway, particularly, in cortical areas V1, MT, and MSTd. It emphasizes the role of feedforward cascade processing and feedback from higher to earlier processing stages for selective feature enhancement and tuning. Our results demonstrate that the model reproduces several key psychophysical findings in perceptual motion transparency using random dot stimuli. Moreover, the model is able to process transparent motion as well as opaque surface motion in real-world sequences of 3-d scenes. As a main thesis, we argue that the perception of transparent motion relies on the representation of multiple velocities at one spatial location; however, this feature is necessary but not sufficient to perceive transparency. It is suggested that the activations simultaneously representing multiple activities are subsequently integrated by separate mechanisms leading to the segregation of different overlapping segments.
Combining spatial and feature-based attention within the receptive field of MT neurons
2009, Vision Research
This study investigates the effects of feature-based attention on responses of direction-selective neurons in the middle temporal area (MT) of macaque visual cortex to attended stimuli inside the receptive field. Redirecting attention between the preferred and null direction of transparent random dot motion patterns caused a mean modulation of responses of ∼32%, about half of what was observed when the two directions of motion in the receptive field were spatially separated allowing feature-based and spatial attention to work in concert. This is consistent with models of visual attention that interpret the attentional modulation of a neuron as the combination of all attentional influences, treating stimulus location simply as another feature.
Accurate Channel Prediction Based on Transformer: Making Mobility Negligible
2022, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
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Visual attention: of features and transparent surfaces