Orienting of Attention

Bartlett viewed thinking as a high level skill exhibiting ballistic properties that he called its “point of no return”. This paper explores one aspect of.
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Finally I consider how the combined cognitive and neuroscience approach to attention may influence future findings. Probably the largest number of citations to my Bartlett lecture arose from the cueing method employed to observe the movement of attention to the target. I did not originate the method nor was this my first use of it. To my knowledge the method began with the effort of J.

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Leonard , at the time a researcher in Cambridge, to discover the length of time needed to assimilate one bit of information. He wanted to separate the one bit of knowledge from the time to perceive the stimulus or produce the response. To do this he presented subjects with six lights; the participants were to respond as quickly as possible when one light was turned off.

In some conditions, prior to extinguishing the target light he turned off three of the lights, thus reducing the possible stimulus—response S—R combinations by one bit from six to three alternatives. The time required to reduce reaction time from that obtained with six alternatives to that obtained with only three was the desired time for assimilating one bit of information.

This was a brilliant study, but unfortunately because the use of information theory did not solve all the problems of psychology as had been hoped it is largely forgotten. Fitts, then at Ohio State University. This history perhaps explains my later postdoc at Cambridge with Robert Wilkinson and the close links my work has always had with the Cambridge unit. I believed this yielded the time to image the letter. In Posner, I called this general method of using reaction time to measure entirely covert cognitive processes encoding functions , since they could be used to measure any internal operation free from stimulus and response factors.

In O of A I was reporting on our adaptation of this method to the study of attention in an empty visual field.


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The subject looked at a central stimulus, flanked on each side by a box; after an interval the box would change in luminance, and when a target asterisk appeared the subject had to response by pressing a single key. A change in the luminance of the box was the cue for attention to move to the target, and thus the time needed to shift attention to the cued location could be measured. Various control conditions were used to eliminate alternative explanations such as forward masking or inhibiting a response to the cue.

In these early experiments I also used probability to make sure that participants oriented to the cue. If the cue indicated that the target would occur at the cued location with probability. However, if the probability of the target being at the cued location was only. I believed that attention had been summoned to the cue exogenously, but was then voluntarily endogenously moved from the cued location to where the target was most likely.

It was this beautiful time-locked shifts of attention that I thought would open the way for a detailed physiology of attention. Another aspect of the cueing method was that the peripheral cues that summoned attention to a location could be compared with central cues arrows that had a merely symbolic relationship to where one was to look. I called these methods exogenous and endogenous cueing. At the time O of A was written many psychologists did not believe that attention involved internal physical mechanisms but instead viewed it as a resource or general skill Kahneman, ; Neisser, However, the discoveries of Mountcastle and Wurtz, Goldberg, and Robinson of the involvement of neurons in the superior colliculus and the parietal lobe persuaded me to attempt to examine the neural basis of orienting.

As a cognitive psychologist, my goal was to understand the attention system of the human brain.

The orienting response

Because of this goal, I was interested in the common source of attentional effects. Researchers who examined attention from the psychophysical tradition concentrated on the effects of attention on sensory systems, without worrying much about the source of these effects. Both the psychophysical and cognitive approaches have made substantial progress and fit together to describe attention and its influence on even the early stages of sensory processing.

Orienting of Attention - Michael I. Posner,

In the 25 years since O of A, most research has been directed to the consequences of orienting, particularly within the visual system. The exciting psychophysical results have been summarized recently by Carrasco While our work demonstrated that orienting attention prior to a target produced faster reaction times to the target, giving it priority, work by Yeshurun and Carrasco using the cueing method I described above, coupled with sinusoidal grating targets, showed that attention actually improved visibility for high-spatial-frequency information.

In a brilliant experiment, Carrasco used a segmentation task and found that in the fovea, where spatial frequency resolution was higher than optimal for segmentation, attention actually impaired performance, while at the periphery, where spatial resolution was low, attention improved performance. Models that thought of attention as a response bias or a skill designed to improve performance could not handle these results.

These results fit well with those of Carrasco At the time of O of A there was a controversy about whether attention was helpful in the accuracy and speed of perceiving a target in an empty visual field. There was no doubt of the importance of attention when the field was cluttered with distractors Engle, Knowing where to attend allowed you to go directly to the target location and save a large amount of time. It was controversial whether knowledge about where the target was to occur actually improved performance when the field was empty.

We learned, using the cueing method, that the onset of a stimulus in an otherwise empty field was such a good cue for orienting, there was only a small benefit of having a cue in advance of the target. However, once engaged at a location, reorienting attention had a large effect on the time to detect a target at an uncued location. I summarized findings on orienting in an empty field by arguing that the cost of disengaging from attending is larger than the benefits of attending.

Thus when not attending there is little advantage to a cue; once orienting somewhere the cost of disengaging makes the cue quite important. This principle can be applied more generally.

Introduction

Was attention really so unlimited? Duncan showed that it mattered very little whether you knew which of several targets was going to occur, but if you detected one target your performance was greatly diminished for a second one. In other words, once attending to something there is a powerful cost of switching attention. Duncan's result was important in showing that one could monitor in parallel with relatively little or no loss, but attending in the sense of conscious detection was limited indeed. These findings became the basis for distinguishing between an orienting system involved in monitoring the sensory world and a second attention system more related to detection and conscious control.

This work presented participants with a complex scene. A change was produced somewhere in the scene, but without either luminance or motion cues that are normally effective in reorienting attention. They found even dramatic changes like substituting a horse's head for a human head at the dinner table went unreported. The dramatic nature of this demonstration often leads people to forget that with luminance cues or motion cues present, as happens most often, reorienting occurs, and changes can be easily detected. My goal was to understand the source of the orienting effect.

At the time O of A was written it seemed important to me to show that attention actually moved across the visual field in a way analogous to a saccade. I felt this would contribute to making covert attention seem more concrete like an eye movement. A paper by Shulman, Remington, and McClean showed that intermediate locations between fixation and target were facilitated during the time of the shift.

In retrospect it proved not to be crucial. At the time, the idea of an attention movement meant that we had to regard orienting as a physical event with a real time consequence in the nervous system. However, when Georgopoulos, Lurito, Petrides, Schwartz, and Massey showed how that changing set of receptive field orientations in the motor system could produce a covert analogue of mental rotation in the case of monkey arm movements, it no longer seemed necessary to have something actually moving in order to consider it as a real time event in the human brain.

A more persistent issue has been the relation between covert shifts of attention and eye movements. This issue was fundamental to me because I hoped to use orienting of attention as a model for probing areas of attention that were not at all close to sensory systems e. If orienting was the same as preparing a saccade, knowledge of its properties would be less useful as a model for types of attention that had nothing to do with sensory systems, but involved emotions, memories, or thoughts.

In O of A I did establish that orienting of attention could take place without an eye movement. I also presented evidence in the same paper Posner, , Figure 11, p. I was certainly wrong about that. Rizzolatti, Riggio, Dascola, and Umilta argued that premotor cortex, especially the frontal eye fields, was the source of the orienting effects that involved programming, though not always making an eye movement. Moreover, some behavioural results did not show the independence between eye movements and attention shifts that were reported in O of A, but favoured Rizolatti's argument.

Somewhat later there was also a clear imaging result Corbetta, showing a very strong overlap, approaching identity, between brain areas involved in generation of saccades and those involved in covert orienting of attention. For this reason, I began to think that orienting of attention was not a good model for a separate attention system, but was instead very closely related to saccadic eye movements. One place where dependence between covert attention and eye movements is strongest is when stimuli lie between the fovea and a peripheral target so that the perception of the target is diminished Bouma, This phenomenon is often called crowding.

When people are asked to make an eye movement toward the target the crowding effect is reduced, even before the eyes begin to move. This finding shows that making an eye movement can amplify attention effects and produce results not obtained by a covert attention shift. Moore, Burrows, Armstrong, Schafer, and Chang argue that the populations of sensory and movement cells in the frontal eye fields are not distinct, and most cells have both motor and sensory functions.

These authors also indicate that covert shifts and saccadic preparation interact and that in some circumstances, the attention shifts appear to control saccadic trajectories, and in other situations, the reverse. Although the premotor theory was certainly correct that both attention and eye movements are influenced by the same prefrontal structure, it appears that there is an important separation and interaction between the two at both the cellular and the behavioural levels.

Although even now this issue is not settled, it is a very good example of the importance of considering all levels of analysis when attempting to develop a strong theoretical account. For the time being, I still think that O of A, which illustrates the various theories of the relation between saccades and eye movements, may be about right in proposing an intermediate level of dependence that may reflect early experience leading to their close coordination.

I had often used an arrow at fixation to direct attention to locations in the visual field. Since the cueing method allows separation of the influence of the cue from that of the target, it is possible to examine the parts of the brain activated by the cue separate from those activated by targets. Following an invalid target, a more ventral set of brain areas that included the temporal—parietal junction were activated. At the time I was writing O of A, I did not think about there being separate brain networks for different functions of attention.

In fact almost nothing was known about the neural system underlying orienting, much less other networks of attention. Each of these networks involved multiple brain areas and their connections. At first, imaging was very restricted in the ability to deal with individual brains because of limits to the amount of radiation one could use, but with the advent of magnetic resonance imaging MRI that restriction was reduced, and it became possible to consider individual differences as resulting from the efficiency of brain networks that were common to everyone.

I believe that the ideas concerning brain networks that arose with imaging studies provides a very good way of relating common psychological functions, studied by cognitive psychologists, with individual differences as they have been studied by researchers in development and personality. There are individual differences in the efficiency of each of the three attention networks. The task requires the person to press one key if a central arrow points to the left and another if it points to the right.

Conflict is introduced by having surrounding flanker arrows point in either the same congruent or the opposite incongruent direction. Cues presented prior to the target provide information on where or when the target will occur.

Orienting of Attention

Three scores are computed, which relate to the performance of each individual in alerting, orienting, and executive control. In our work we have used the ANT to examine the efficiency of brain networks underlying attention Fan et al. A children's version of this test is very similar to the adult test, but replaces the arrows with fish Rueda et al.

Studies have shown moderate reliability of conflict scores, but much lower reliability for the orienting and alerting scores MacLeod et al. The attentional networks involve different cortical brain areas Fan et al. It is clear that the networks communicate and work together in many situations, even though their anatomy is mostly distinct. The network view arising from imaging of attention seems to me to bring together the cognitive approach with its emphasis on functions common to most or all of the people studied with the individual differences approach.

Attention networks are common to everyone, but their efficiency differs. These differences may in part reflect genetic variation between people and in part reflect life experiences. An important consequence of imaging brain networks is to raise the issue of how attention networks become organized in early life. We conducted a longitudinal study on the development of the executive attention network, which is closely related to self-regulation.

The testing began when the infants were 7 months old. We had thought that this was enough for us to observe the earliest part of the development of the executive network. Infants orient to them by moving their eyes and head to the location. On some trials infants showed that they anticipated what was coming by orienting prior to the stimulus. Journal of the Optical society of America 46, — The world around us: Schmitt Lecture in Neuroscience for Neuroscience Research Progress Bulletin 14, Supplement 1— Brain mechanisms for directed attention.

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Orienting of attention.

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Yamaguchi S, Kobayashi S. Contributions of the dopaminergic system to voluntary and automatic orienting of visuospatial attention. Email alerts New issue alert. Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic. Dyskinesias and motor fluctuations in Parkinson's disease: Possible role of its antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and antiapoptotic effects. High prevalence of parkinsonism in patients with MCI or mild Alzheimer's disease.