Spatial selection of features within perceived and remembered objects

Spatial Selection of Features within Perceived and Remembered Objects

Our representation of the visual world can be modulated by spatially specific attentional biases that depend flexibly on task goals. We compared searching for task-relevant features in perceived versus remembered objects. When searching perceptual input, selected task-relevant and suppressed task-irrelevant features elicited contrasting spatiotopic ERP effects, despite them being perceptually i...

Applying an Attentional Set to Perceived and Remembered Features

Previous research has examined our ability to attend selectively to particular features of perceptual objects, as well as our ability to switch from attending to one type of feature to another. This is usually done in the context of anticipatory attentional-set control, comparing the neural mechanisms involved as participants prepare to attend to the same stimulus feature as on the previous tri...

The spatial distribution of attention within and across objects.

Attention operates to select both spatial locations and perceptual objects. However, the specific mechanism by which attention is oriented to objects is not well understood. We examined the means by which object structure constrains the distribution of spatial attention (i.e., a "grouped array"). Using a modified version of the Egly et al. object cuing task, we systematically manipulated within...

Directing spatial attention to locations within remembered and imagined mental representations

Spatial attention enables us to enhance the processing of items at target locations, at the expense of items presented at irrelevant locations. Many studies have explored the neural correlates of these spatial biases using event-related potentials (ERPs). More recently some studies have shown that these ERP correlates are also present when subjects search visual short-term memory (VSTM). This s...

Why the past is sometimes perceived, and not only remembered