08:30 - 10:00
Tue-B16-Talk IV-
Tue-Talk IV-
Room: B16
Chair/s:
Jan Tünnermann, Adriana L Ruiz-Rizzo, Ingrid Scharlau
Bundesen’s Theory of Visual Attention (TVA) has been around for approximately half a century. Its basic idea is that visual perception is biased competition of visual categorizations that race visual short-term memory. The biases stem from attentional and perceptual influences. TVA links observable data to theoretical concepts with mathematical rigor and helps to explain phenomena with quantitatively precise concepts. Progress in TVA might not be fast, but it is continuous and robust. This symposium covers recent developments in topics of basic and applied research. In the first session, Scharlau & Tünnermann survey recent advances with new stimuli and recording
settings. Connecting to this, Biermeier & Scharlau investigate attention capacity in mixed-reality settings. Poth & Schneider disentangle the speed of location and object processing. Tünnermann et al. show how simulations of visual foraging depend on dynamically adjusting spatial attention, and Blurton et al. discuss improvements in modeling cognitive control. The second session focuses on recent applications of TVA in clinical contexts: Ruiz-Rizzo et al. present the relationship between visual processing speed and cognitive complaints in older adults. Kattlun et al. investigate the role of visual-short-term memory in cognitive deficits of patients who survived severe sepsis. Martin et
al. demonstrate how fatigue relates to visual processing speed and pupillary unrest in post-COVID patients. Srowig et al. close by showing how visual short-term memory is associated with neuropsychological performance in patients at a high-risk for dementia.
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"Seeing where" happens earlier and faster than "seeing what“
Tue-B16-Talk IV-03
Presented by: Christian H. Poth
Christian H. Poth 1, 2, Werner X. Schneider 1, 2
1 Neuro-cognitive Psychology, Department of Psychology, Bielefeld University, 2 Center for Cognitive Interaction Technology, Bielefeld University
Recent evidence suggests that visual processing for perception within the ventral visual “what” stream not only computes feature (e.g., color) and category information (e.g., object identity) but also spatial information (e.g., object position). Thus, an object’s category and its location at least partly seem to be processed by the same mechanisms. Therefore, we ask whether the location of an object and its object category are processed equally or whether they differ in how fast they are processed and in how early their processing starts. To this end, participants performed a letter report task in which they briefly viewed a letter that was terminated by a mask display. Afterwards, they reported the identity of the letter (alphanumeric category) and its spatial location. Assessing report performance as a function of presentation duration of the letter and using the Theory of Visual Attention (TVA, Bundesen, 1990, Dyrholm et al., 2011), we obtained measures for the onset (temporal threshold of conscious perception) and the speed of visual processing for both features, letter location and letter identity. We found for location reports that the visual processing speed was higher than for reports of letter identity and, in contrast to a key assumption of TVA, that the temporal threshold of conscious perception was lower. Thus, seeing where an object was happened earlier and faster than seeing what the object was.
Keywords: visual attention, object recognition, TVA
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