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Neural fate of ignored stimuli: dissociable effects of perceptual and working memory load

Nature Neuroscience volume 7, pages 992–996 (2004)Cite this article

Abstract

Observers commonly experience functional blindness to unattended visual events, and this problem has fuelled an intense debate concerning the fate of unattended visual information in neural processing. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to demonstrate that the type of task that a human subject engages in determines the way in which ignored visual background stimuli are processed in parahippocampal cortex. Increasing the perceptual difficulty of a foveal target task attenuated processing of task-irrelevant background scenes, whereas increasing the number of objects held in working memory did not have this effect. These dissociable effects of perceptual and working memory load clarify how task-irrelevant, unattended stimuli are processed in category-selective areas in human ventral visual cortex.

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Figure 1: Primary task stimuli.
Figure 2: fMRI signal change in the PPA ROI as a function of task type and background scene repetition.
Figure 3: Behavioral results of the face repetition detection performance.
Figure 4: Examples of composite images used to localize the PPA ROI.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant EY014193 (M.M.C.). It was also partly supported by a Vanderbilt University Discovery Grant (M.M.C.), NIH grant F32 EY015043 (G.F.W.) and National Science Foundation grant BCS 0094992 (R.M.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Yale University, PO Box 208205, 2 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, 06520, Connecticut, USA

    Do-Joon Yi, David Widders & Marvin M Chun

  2. Department of Psychology, Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience, and Vanderbilt Vision Research Center, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, 37203, Tennessee, USA

    Geoffrey F Woodman & René Marois

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  2. Geoffrey F Woodman
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  5. Marvin M Chun
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Correspondence to Marvin M Chun.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Video 1

Example trial in the low-demand baseline task (target present). You will see a stream of faces appearing in the middle of scenes, interleaved with masks. Ignore the scenes, and monitor the faces to detect a consecutive repetition of a face's identity (one-back task). The trial will end with the word “one” at fixation to remind the subject that she/he is performing the one-back task. Please do the task now before proceeding. (MOV 427 kb)

In this trial, a face was consecutively repeated (target-present) while six different scenes were presented in the background (unrepeated scene condition). Not shown here are the high perceptual demand task, which was identical except that the faces were degraded with noise, and the high working memory task, which was identical except that face repetitions occurred across two frames in target-present trials (target-absent trials were identical to the baseline condition).

Supplementary Video 2

Example trial in the low-demand baseline task (target absent). You will see a stream of faces appearing in the middle of scenes, interleaved with masks. Ignore the scenes, and monitor the faces to detect a consecutive repetition of a face's identity (one-back task). The trial will end with the word “one” at fixation to remind the subject that she/he is performing the one-back task. Please do the task now before proceeding. (MOV 448 kb)

In this trial, no face was repeated (target-absent) while two background scenes alternated across frames (repeated scene condition). You may also try the 2-back task with this example. Not shown here are the high perceptual demand task, which was identical except that the faces were degraded with noise, and the high working memory task, which was identical except that face repetitions occurred across two frames in target-present trials (target-absent trials were identical to the baseline condition).

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Yi, DJ., Woodman, G., Widders, D. et al. Neural fate of ignored stimuli: dissociable effects of perceptual and working memory load. Nat Neurosci 7, 992–996 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1294

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