Cognitive Electrophysiology of Attention

Cognitive Electrophysiology of Attention

Signals of the Mind
2014, Pages 152-164
Cognitive Electrophysiology of Attention

Chapter 12 - The Neural Basis of Color Binding to an Attended Object

https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-398451-7.00012-9Get rights and content

Abstract

A key prediction of object-based models of attention is that paying attention to one feature of an object results in the preferential selection of the entire object, including its features that are task irrelevant. Using event-related brain potentials, we investigated the timing of the selection of a task-irrelevant color feature while subjects discriminated object shapes. The selection of the task-irrelevant color belonging to the attended shape occurred approximately 50 ms after the sensory encoding of color was initiated in ventral, extrastriate visual cortex (area V4/V8). The neural generators of this attention-related facilitation of the irrelevant color feature were localized to the same color-selective cortical region. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that selection of an object on the basis of its overall form or shape leads to enhanced processing of the object's irrelevant features in their feature-specific modules, suggesting a general mechanism for binding separate features into unified perceptual objects.

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