Trends in Cognitive Sciences
ReviewAttention in the real world: toward understanding its neural basis
Section snippets
Attentional selection in daily life
The primary goal of selective visual attention is to focus processing resources on behaviorally relevant objects in our visual environment. In our daily lives, we direct attention (and, with it, often our eyes) all the time: when searching for a coffee cup in the cupboard, when looking out for cars while crossing the street, or when trying to find a friend at a conference. Because we perform so many visual searches every day, often for the same objects (e.g., people) and often within the same
Classical approaches to the study of visual search
To study the process of selecting behaviorally relevant information from cluttered displays in the laboratory, behavioral and neurophysiological studies have typically greatly reduced the complexity of the real world by having participants perform search tasks in displays comprising simple and well-defined stimuli presented on uniform backgrounds (Figure 1B). For example, in a display comprising red and green lines of different orientation, observers search for the presence of a specific target
The next frontier: understanding the neural basis of real-world visual search
In daily life, we select meaningful objects from meaningful scenes. Indeed, we usually do not direct attention to an empty region in space and we rarely decide to detect simple features such as horizontal lines or upward motion. Thus, although studies using simplified displays have been fundamental for our understanding of basic attention mechanisms, their results are not readily applicable to real-world scenarios. For example, what would be the behavioral prediction for detecting people in the
Neural basis of category-level search in real-world scenes
Recent neuroimaging studies have started to investigate the neural basis of visual search in real-world scenes 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32. In a series of studies 27, 28, 30, functional MRI (fMRI) activity was measured while participants detected the presence of objects from a cued category (cars, people) in briefly presented photographs of outdoor scenes like those in Figure 1A. The presented scenes were new to the participants, contained a large number of distracter objects, varied greatly
A framework for real-world search
The studies reviewed in the previous section have provided ample evidence that real-world search is aided by content-specific attentional templates that are implemented in object-selective cortex and carry a neural signature reminiscent of processes that are also used during the feedforward activation of object representations. We refer to these templates as the ‘what’ templates. In addition to the ‘what’ templates, recent studies have shown that spatial biases are generated during template
Concluding remarks and future directions
We have argued that attentional selection under naturalistic conditions uses additional and partly different mechanisms compared with those that have been studied using artificial displays. This provides only one example indicating that a full understanding of cognition will be possible only by considering the complexity of the real world 1, 66. There are many outstanding questions (Box 4). Addressing these questions will require consideration of findings from multiple fields, including not
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