Investigating neuronal correlates of attention to different feature dimensions using intracranial EEG
Mon—Casino_1.811—Poster1—2104
Presented by: Tobias Schoeberl
Visual attention can be deployed to specific feature dimensions of attended objects. It is possible, for example, to attend to the motion direction of an object without focusing on color. In the present study, nine patients with drug resistant epilepsy who underwent presurgical evaluation with intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG, 767 contact points) performed a simple change detection task. They either attended to the color or to the motion direction of one out of two superimposed random-dot patterns (RDPs) and responded to brief changes in the attended feature dimension. We show that information about the state of attention (whether motion or color was attended) is present in several frequency bands of the recordings, ranging from theta to the high gamma frequencies. This result suggests that both, suppression of task irrelevant information (as evidenced by low frequency band modulations, < 30 Hz) as well as enhancement of task relevant information (as evidenced by high frequency band modulations, > 30 Hz) is involved. Specifically, when motion was attended, we observe increased low frequency power of contact points in areas associated with color processing, indicating suppression of task irrelevant features. The reversed effect in motion sensitive areas cannot be shown, most probably due to the lack of a sufficient number of contact points in motion sensitive areas. In sum, the present results suggest that a combination of suppression and enhancement realizes attention to different feature dimensions.
Keywords: visual attention, feature-dimension-based attention, color processing, motion processing, intracranial EEG