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The locus of attentional effects in texture segmentation

Nature Neuroscience volume 3, pages 622–627 (2000)Cite this article

Abstract

Cuing covert spatial attention can increase spatial resolution. Here we pinpointed the specific locus of this effect using texture segmentation. At the level of visual cortex, texture segmentation theoretically involves passage of visual input through two layers of spatial linear filters separated by a pointwise nonlinearity. By manipulating the textures to differentially stimulate first- or second-order filters of various scales, we showed that the attentional effect consistently varied with the latter. These psychophysical results further support the hypothesis that attention increases resolution at the attended location and are consistent with an effect of attention at stages as early as the primary visual cortex.

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Figure 1: Stimuli and results of experiment 1.
Figure 2
Figure 3: Stimuli and results of experiment 2.
Figure 4: Stimuli and results of experiments 3 and 4.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by an NSF National Young Investigator Grant, a Cattell Sabbatical Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship to M.C. We thank A.M. Vaduva for assistance in collecting data for experiment 2 and L. Cameron, E. Davis, J.D. Fernández, K. Frieder, M. Landy, L. Maloney, D. Pelli, C. Penpeci-Talgar, Y. Tsal and S. Wolfson for comments on a draft of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, 10003, New York, USA

    Yaffa Yeshurun & Marisa Carrasco

  2. Department of Neural Science, New York University, New York, 10003, New York, USA

    Marisa Carrasco

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  1. Yaffa Yeshurun
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  2. Marisa Carrasco
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Correspondence to Marisa Carrasco.

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Yeshurun, Y., Carrasco, M. The locus of attentional effects in texture segmentation. Nat Neurosci 3, 622–627 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/75804

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