scholarly journals Covert attention beyond the range of eye-movements: Evidence for a dissociation between exogenous and endogenous orienting

Cortex ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 122 ◽  
pp. 170-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soazig Casteau ◽  
Daniel T. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Covert Attention ◽  
Endogenous Orienting

scholarly journals LIP activity in the interstimulus interval of a change detection task biases the behavioral response

2015 ◽  
Vol 114 (5) ◽  
pp. 2637-2648 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabrice Arcizet ◽  
Koorosh Mirpour ◽  
Daniel J. Foster ◽  
Caroline J. Charpentier ◽  
James W. Bisley
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Change Detection ◽  
Behavioral Response ◽  
Interstimulus Interval ◽  
Detection Task ◽  
Covert Attention ◽  
Change Detection Task ◽  
Lateral Intraparietal Area ◽  
Overt Attention ◽  
The World

When looking around at the world, we can only attend to a limited number of locations. The lateral intraparietal area (LIP) is thought to play a role in guiding both covert attention and eye movements. In this study, we tested the involvement of LIP in both mechanisms with a change detection task. In the task, animals had to indicate whether an element changed during a blank in the trial by making a saccade to it. If no element changed, they had to maintain fixation. We examine how the animal's behavior is biased based on LIP activity prior to the presentation of the stimulus the animal must respond to. When the activity was high, the animal was more likely to make an eye movement toward the stimulus, even if there was no change; when the activity was low, the animal either had a slower reaction time or maintained fixation, even if a change occurred. We conclude that LIP activity is involved in both covert and overt attention, but when decisions about eye movements are to be made, this role takes precedence over guiding covert attention.

scholarly journals The effects of endogenous and exogenus orienting of attention on source memory

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-89
Author(s):  
Selene Cansino
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Source Memory ◽  
Memory Task ◽  
Covert Attention ◽  
Control Mechanisms ◽  
Eye Tracker ◽  
Memory Representations ◽  
The Right ◽  
Symbolic Cues

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of endogenous and exogenous orienting of attention on episodic memory. Thirty healthy participants performed a cueing attention paradigm during encoding, in which images of common objects were presented either to the left or to the right of the center of the screen. Before the presentation of each image, three types of symbolic cues were displayed to indicate the location in which the stimuli would appear: valid cues to elicit endogenous orientation, invalid cues to prompt exogenous orientation and neutral or uncued trials. The participants’ task was to discriminate whether the images were symmetrical or not while fixating on the center of the screen to assure the manifestation of only covert attention mechanisms. Covert attention refers to the ability to orient attention by means of central control mechanisms alone, without head and eye movements. Trials with eye movements were excluded after inspection of eye-tracker recordings that were conducted throughout the task. During retrieval, participants conducted a source memory task in which they indicated the location where the images were presented during encoding. Memory for spatial context was superior during endogenous orientation than during exogenous orientation, whereas exogenous orientation was associated with a greater number of missed responses compared to the neutral trials. The formation of episodic memory representations with contextual details benefits from endogenous attention.

scholarly journals Microsaccades reflect the dynamics of misdirected attention in magic

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony S. Barnhart ◽  
Francisco M. Costela ◽  
Susana Martinez-Conde ◽  
Stephen L. Macknik ◽  
Stephen D. Goldinger
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Ecological Validity ◽  
Spatial Location ◽  
Covert Attention ◽  
Attentional Processes ◽  
Match To Sample ◽  
Magic Trick ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Trial Setting

The methods of magicians provide powerful tools for enhancing the ecological validity of laboratory studies of attention. The current research borrows a technique from magic to explore the relationship between microsaccades and covert attention under near-natural viewing conditions. We monitored participants’ eye movements as they viewed a magic trick where a coin placed beneath a napkin vanishes and reappears beneath another napkin. Many participants fail to see the coin move from one location to the other the first time around, thanks to the magician’s misdirection. However, previous research was unable to distinguish whether or not participants were fooled based on their eye movements. Here, we set out to determine if microsaccades may provide a window into the efficacy of the magician’s misdirection. In a multi-trial setting, participants monitored the location of the coin (which changed positions in half of the trials), while engaging in a delayed match-to-sample task at a different spatial location. Microsaccades onset times varied with task difficulty, and microsaccade directions indexed the locus of covert attention. Our com-bined results indicate that microsaccades may be a useful metric of covert attentional processes in applied and ecologically valid settings.

scholarly journals Overt and covert attention shifts to emotional faces – combining EEG, Eye-tracking and a Go/No-go paradigm

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louisa Kulke ◽  
Lena Brümmer ◽  
Arezoo Pooresmaeili ◽  
Annekathrin Schacht
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Emotional Content ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Covert Attention ◽  
Emotional Expressions ◽  
Brain Potentials ◽  
Emotional Faces ◽  
Attention Shifts

In everyday life, faces with emotional expressions quickly attract attention and eye-movements. To study the neural mechanisms of such emotion-driven attention by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs), tasks that employ covert shifts of attention are commonly used, in which participants need to inhibit natural eye-movements towards stimuli. It remains, however, unclear how shifts of attention to emotional faces with and without eye-movements differ from each other. The current preregistered study aimed to investigate neural differences between covert and overt emotion-driven attention. We combined eye-tracking with measurements of ERPs to compare shifts of attention to faces with happy, angry or neutral expressions when eye-movements were either executed (Go conditions) or withheld (No-go conditions). Happy and angry faces led to larger EPN amplitudes, shorter latencies of the P1 component and faster saccades, suggesting that emotional expressions significantly affected shifts of attention. Several ERPs (N170, EPN, LPC), were augmented in amplitude when attention was shifted with an eye-movement, indicating an enhanced neural processing of faces if eye-movements had to be executed together with a reallocation of attention. However, the modulation of ERPs by facial expressions did not differ between the Go and No-go conditions, suggesting that emotional content enhances both covert and overt shifts of attention. In summary, our results indicate that overt and covert attention shifts differ but are comparably affected by emotional content.

scholarly journals Covert Attention Tracking: Towards Two-Dimensional Real-Time Recordings

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Regina Gregori Grgic ◽  
Claudio De'Sperati
Keyword(s):  
Steady State ◽  
Eye Movements ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Visual Evoked Potentials ◽  
Vertical Motion ◽  
Target Motion ◽  
Covert Attention ◽  
Motion Processing ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Functional Architecture

Achieving attention tracking as easily as recording eye movements is still beyond reach. However, by exploiting Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials (SSVEPs) we could recently record in a satisfactory way the horizontal trajectory of covert visuospatial attention in single trials, both when attending target motion and during mental motion extrapolation. Here we show that, despite the different cortical functional architecture for horizontal and vertical motion processing, the same result is obtained for vertical attention tracking. Thus, it seems that trustworthy real-time two-dimensional attention tracking, with both physical and imagined target motion, is not a too far goal.

scholarly journals Associations and Dissociations between Oculomotor Readiness and Covert Attention

Vision ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soazig Casteau ◽  
Daniel T. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Covert Attention ◽  
Exogenous Attention ◽  
Exogenous Orienting ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Endogenous Orienting ◽  
Covert Orienting ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Premotor Theory

The idea that covert mental processes such as spatial attention are fundamentally dependent on systems that control overt movements of the eyes has had a profound influence on theoretical models of spatial attention. However, theories such as Klein’s Oculomotor Readiness Hypothesis (OMRH) and Rizzolatti’s Premotor Theory have not gone unchallenged. We previously argued that although OMRH/Premotor theory is inadequate to explain pre-saccadic attention and endogenous covert orienting, it may still be tenable as a theory of exogenous covert orienting. In this article we briefly reiterate the key lines of argument for and against OMRH/Premotor theory, then evaluate the Oculomotor Readiness account of Exogenous Orienting (OREO) with respect to more recent empirical data. These studies broadly confirm the importance of oculomotor preparation for covert, exogenous attention. We explain this relationship in terms of reciprocal links between parietal ‘priority maps’ and the midbrain oculomotor centres that translate priority-related activation into potential saccade endpoints. We conclude that the OMRH/Premotor theory hypothesis is false for covert, endogenous orienting but remains tenable as an explanation for covert, exogenous orienting.

Eye movements are an important part of the story, but not the whole story

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle R. Cave
Keyword(s):  
Visual Search ◽  
Eye Movements ◽  
Covert Attention ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Visual Targets ◽  
Selection Mechanisms

AbstractSome previous accounts of visual search have emphasized covert attention at the expense of eye movements, and others have focused on eye movements while ignoring covert attention. Both selection mechanisms are likely to contribute to many searches, and a full account of search will probably need to explain how the two interact to find visual targets.

Fixational Eye Movements Are Not an Index of Covert Attention

2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 356-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd S. Horowitz ◽  
Elisabeth M. Fine ◽  
David E. Fencsik ◽  
Sergey Yurgenson ◽  
Jeremy M. Wolfe
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Covert Attention ◽  
Fixational Eye Movements

Covert Attention and Eye Movements during Reading

1989 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albrecht Werner Inhoff ◽  
Alexander Pollatsek ◽  
Michael I. Posner ◽  
Keith Rayner
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Reading Performance ◽  
Covert Attention ◽  
Attentional Processes ◽  
Reliable Effect ◽  
Eye Movements During Reading ◽  
Attentional Spotlight

Eye movements were monitored during the reading of spatially transformed text in order to examine covert attentional processes in reading. In some conditions, the sequence of letters within a word was congruent with (i.e. in the same direction as) the sequence of words in the sentence; in other conditions the direction of letters within words and the direction of words in the sentence were incongruent. In addition, the window of visible text was varied so that in some conditions only the fixated word (and all preceding words) were visible, whereas in other conditions the fixated word and the succeeding word were both visible. Readers were able to extract more parafoveal information from text when the words themselves were normal than when the letters within the words were transformed. However, with practice, readers were able to use some parafoveal information even when the words were transformed. The most important finding was that the congruity of the word and letter order had no reliable effect on the ability to extract parafoveal information and influenced reading performance only when the words themselves were normal. We conclude that covert attention in reading is not a letter-by-letter scan that sweeps across the page, but either an asymmetric spotlight held constant on each fixation or a shifting of an attentional spotlight extending across multiletter units (possibly words) with the direction of shifts of attention closely coupled to the direction of eye movements.

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