Expectation and attention in visual cognition: neural and computational approaches.
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1
University of Oxford, United Kingdom
A rich literature has explored how top-down anticipatory biases help resolve competition among visual representations. In many studies, attention is biased via probabilistic cues signaling what is likely to occur, or at which location. However, this class of paradigm confounds the relevance of a feature or location for behaviour, and the conditional probability that a specific event will occur. Outside of the laboratory, these two sources of information, stimulus relevance (here, ‘attention’) and stimulus probability (here, ‘expectation’), do not always vary together - for example, statistical regularities in the environment are learned even when they are task-irrelevant. We will describe empirical and theoretical work aimed at dissociating the influences of expectation and attention on visual cognition. Speaker 1 (Summerfield) will describe novel psychophysical methods revealing dissociable effects of signal relevance and signal probability on detection sensitivity, and propose a computational model to account for these effects. Speaker 2 (de Lange) will describe retinotopically mapped blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signals in the visual cortex that respond to expectation and attention. Speaker 3 (Turk-Browne) will describe prospective BOLD signals in the extrastriate visual cortex that encode the conditional probability of occurrence of a stimulus in the absence of attention. Speaker 4 (Seriès) will propose a computational model in which statistical learning promotes perceptual expectations, and show that this model can account for well-described biases in discrimination tasks. Collectively, this work suggests that attention and expectation may modulate information processing in the visual system, and it neural consequences, in a dissociable fashion.
Keywords:
BOLD signal,
visual cognition
Conference:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 25 Sep - 29 Sep, 2011.
Presentation Type:
Introduction
Topic:
Symposium 6: Expectation and attention in visual cognition: neural and computational approaches
Citation:
Summerfield
C
(2011). Expectation and attention in visual cognition: neural and computational approaches..
Conference Abstract:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00036
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Received:
09 Nov 2011;
Published Online:
15 Nov 2011.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Christopher Summerfield, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, christopher.summerfield@psy.ox.ac.uk