Attention modulates human visual responses to objects by tuning sharpening
Date
2024-12-16
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
eLife
Abstract
Visual stimuli compete with each other for cortical processing and attention biases this competition in favor of the attended stimulus. How does the relationship between the stimuli affect the strength of this attentional bias? Here, we used functional MRI to explore the effect of target-distractor similarity in neural representation on attentional modulation in the human visual cortex using univariate and multivariate pattern analyses. Using stimuli from four object categories (human bodies, cats, cars, and houses), we investigated attentional effects in the primary visual area V1, the object-selective regions LO and pFs, the body-selective region EBA, and the scene-selective region PPA. We demonstrated that the strength of the attentional bias toward the target is not fixed but decreases with increasing target-distractor similarity. Simulations provided evidence that this result pattern is explained by tuning sharpening rather than an increase in gain. Our findings provide a mechanistic explanation for the behavioral effects of target-distractor similarity on attentional biases and suggest tuning sharpening as the underlying mechanism in object-based attention.
Description
This article was originally published in eLife. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.89836.3.
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).
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Citation
Doostani, Narges, Gholam-Ali Hossein-Zadeh, Radoslaw M Cichy, and Maryam Vaziri-Pashkam. “Attention Modulates Human Visual Responses to Objects by Tuning Sharpening.” Edited by Marius V Peelen and Tirin Moore. eLife 12 (December 16, 2024): RP89836. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.89836.