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Stimuli rendered invisible with the continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm
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In this study, we investigated whether awareness of objects is necessary for object-based guidance of attention. We used the two-rectangle method (Egly, Driver, & Rafal, 1994) to probe object-based attention and adopted the continuous flash suppression technique (Tsuchiya & Koch, 2005) to control for the visibility of the two rectangles. Our result...
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Résumé
Si une barre apparaît soudain entre deux carrés, une fois qu’un des carrés clignote, la barre semble s’éloigner du carré clignotant et s’approcher de l’autre. Cela se produit en dépit du fait que la barre est présentée en une seule occurrence. Le déplacement illusoire est assez fort pour annuler le déplacement réel tracé dans le sens inverse...
Citations
... [69][70][71]) and unconscious object-based attention (cf. [72,73]), however, suggests that the pre-attentive targets of object-based attention can be fully developed object representations with boundaries that do not need to be refined when attended [7]. Early work by Ref. [74] shows that humans are able to extract the layout of a novel scene and understand its meaning within less than 300 ms of a single fixation. ...
The complexity of natural scenes makes it challenging to experimentally study the mechanisms behind human gaze behavior when viewing dynamic environments. Historically, eye movements were believed to be driven primarily by space-based attention towards locations with salient features. Increasing evidence suggests, however, that visual attention does not select locations with high saliency but operates on attentional units given by the objects in the scene. We present a new computational framework to investigate the importance of objects for attentional guidance. This framework is designed to simulate realistic scanpaths for dynamic real-world scenes, including saccade timing and smooth pursuit behavior. Individual model components are based on psychophysically uncovered mechanisms of visual attention and saccadic decision-making. All mechanisms are implemented in a modular fashion with a small number of well-interpretable parameters. To systematically analyze the importance of objects in guiding gaze behavior, we implemented five different models within this framework: two purely spatial models, where one is based on low-level saliency and one on high-level saliency, two object-based models, with one incorporating low-level saliency for each object and the other one not using any saliency information, and a mixed model with object-based attention and selection but space-based inhibition of return. We optimized each model’s parameters to reproduce the saccade amplitude and fixation duration distributions of human scanpaths using evolutionary algorithms. We compared model performance with respect to spatial and temporal fixation behavior, including the proportion of fixations exploring the background, as well as detecting, inspecting, and returning to objects. A model with object-based attention and inhibition, which uses saliency information to prioritize between objects for saccadic selection, leads to scanpath statistics with the highest similarity to the human data. This demonstrates that scanpath models benefit from object-based attention and selection, suggesting that object-level attentional units play an important role in guiding attentional processing.
... The general finding, i.e., object-based attentional effect, is that the target presented at uncued location within the cued rectangle is detected more rapidly than is physically equivalent target presented within the uncued rectangle. Using this paradigm, this object-based attentional effect has been supported by numerous psychophysical (Chou & Yeh, 2012;Nah et al., 2018;, physiological (Pooresmaeili & Roelfsema, 2014;Roelfsema et al., 1998), and brain imaging (Müller & Kleinschmidt, 2003;Zhang et al., 2017) studies. According to these findings, sensory enhancement hypothesis has proposed that attention directs to one location in an object can spread throughout the whole object, resulting in enhanced quality of the sensory representation of the selected object and more efficient Ling Huang, Yu Chen and processing of the features that belong to that object (Chen, 2012). ...
... This departs from the original double-rectangle experiments (Egly et al., 1994) which manipulated the attention in an exogenous manner, and calls for experiments to examine such object-based attention spread effect while tease apart the confusions from endogenous attention. In addition, several studies have shown that object-based attention can be generated in lower subcortical region (Strommer et al., 2020) and even guided by an invisible object (Chou & Yeh, 2012;Norman et al., 2013;. It has been widely accepted that rendering a stimulus invisible could maximally (although not completely) reduce various top-down influences (Huang et al., 2020;Wang et al., 2021Wang et al., , 2022. ...
... In other words, object awareness is not necessary for the spread of object-based attention, and visible and invisible objects can trigger the same gradual spread process. Given rendering a object invisible could maximally (although not completely) reduce various top-down influences (Huang et al., 2020;Wang et al., 2021Wang et al., , 2022, our results, therefore, also can be viewed as identifying an automatic spread of object-based attention, supporting previous psychophysical (Chou & Yeh, 2012;Norman et al., 2013;, neurophysiological (Wannig et al., 2011), and brain imaging (Ekman et al., 2020) studies. ...
Although attention can be directed at certain objects, how object-based attention spreads within an object and whether this spread interacts with awareness remain unclear. Using a modified spatial cuing paradigm with backward masking, we addressed these issues with either visible or invisible displays presenting the real (Experiment 1) and illusory (Experiment 2) U-shaped objects (UOs), whose ends and middles, the possible locations of the cue and target, have iso-eccentric distances from the fixation. These equidistant ends and middles of UOs offered us a unique opportunity to examine whether attention gradually spreads within a given object, i.e., within an UO, attention spreads from its cued-end to uncued-end via the uncued-middle. Despite the visibility (visible or invisible) of UOs, both experiments supported this gradual spread manner by showing a faster response of human participants (male and female) to the target in the uncued-middle than that in the uncued-end. Our results thus indicate a gradual spread of object-based attention and further reveal that this gradual spread is independent of both the "visual objectness" (whether the object is defined as the real or illusory boundaries) and conscious access to objects.
... Numerous studies have followed this paradigm and replicated this effect in various modified versions (Avrahami, 1999;Moore et al., 1998;Watson & Kramer, 1999). The concept of objects in OBA was extended from the original geometric rectangles to objects that perceptually obey the Gestalt law (Marrara & Moore, 2003;Moore et al., 1998), objects stored in memory (Bao et al., 2007;Woodman et al., 2003;Xie et al., 2021), and objects under the perceptual threshold (Chou & Yeh, 2012;Norman et al., 2013). Objects related more closely to real life also elicit the OBA effect, such as words grouped by Chinese characters (Li & Logan, 2008;Yuan & Fu, 2014), objects endowed with social information (Yin et al., 2018;Zhao et al., 2020), and objects presented in a real-world scene (Malcolm & Shomstein, 2015). ...
This study tested how human faces affect object-based attention (OBA) through two online experiments in a modified double-rectangle paradigm. The results of Experiment 1 revealed that faces did not elicit the OBA effect as non-face objects, which was caused by a longer response time (RT) when attention is focused on faces relative to non-face objects. In addition, by observing faster RTs when attention was engaged horizontally rather than vertically, we found a significant horizontal attention bias, which might override the OBA effect if vertical rectangles were the only items presented; these results were replicated in Experiment 2 (using only vertical rectangles) after directly measuring horizontal bias and excluding its influence on the OBA effect. This study suggested that faces cannot elicit the same-object advantage in the double-rectangle paradigm and provided a method to measure the OBA effect free from horizontal bias.
... Numerous studies have followed this paradigm and replicated this effect in various modified versions (Avrahami, 1999;Moore et al., 1998;Watson & Kramer, 1999). The concept of objects in OBA was extended from the original geometric rectangles to objects that perceptually obey the Gestalt law (Marrara & Moore, 2003;Moore et al., 1998), objects stored in memory (Bao et al., 2007;Woodman et al., 2003;Xie et al., 2021), and objects under the perceptual threshold (Chou & Yeh, 2012;Norman et al., 2013). Objects related more closely to real life also elicit the OBA effect, such as words grouped by Chinese characters (Li & Logan, 2008;Yuan & Fu, 2014), objects endowed with social information (Yin et al., 2018;Zhao et al., 2020), and objects presented in a real-world scene (Malcolm & Shomstein, 2015). ...
... However, the "object" in the OBA is not limited to the visible object. Several types of research have found the OBA effect in invisible objects, such as objects under the perceptual threshold (Chou & Yeh, 2012;Norman et al., 2013 ;Zhang & Fang, 2012). For example, using the continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm, researchers made the double rectangles invisible for the participants and achieved the subliminal manipulation of the object. ...
... For example, using the continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm, researchers made the double rectangles invisible for the participants and achieved the subliminal manipulation of the object. Under these circumstances, the OBA effect was still observed even though the participants were unaware of the objects (Chou & Yeh, 2012). The same finding was obtained using the alternation of a Gabor patch and objects with low contrast and a short exposure time to make objects invisible to the participants (Norman et al., 2013;Zhang & Fang, 2012). ...
... This object representation could be maintained in VWM or VSTM (Bao et al., 2007;Griffin & Nobre, 2003). Even an invisible object (Chou & Yeh, 2012;Norman et al., 2013 ;Zhang & Fang, 2012) or imaginary object (Ongchoco & Scholl, 2019) could produce the OBA effect. The mechanisms for the OBA may be different from visual imagery (Ongchoco & Scholl, 2019) or subliminal perception (Norman et al., 2013;Zhang & Fang, 2012), but they are consistent in maintaining the representation of objects. ...
Numerous studies have shown that attention can be allocated to various types of objects, such as low-level objects developed by perceptual organization and high-level objects developed by semantic associations. However, little is known about whether attention can also be affected solely by object representations in the brain, after the disappearance of physical objects. Here, we used a modified double-rectangle paradigm to investigate how attention is affected by object representation in visual sensory memory when the physical objects disappear for a short period of time before the target onset. By manipulating the interstimulus interval (ISI) between the offset of the objects and the onset of the target, an object-based attention effect, with shorter reaction times (RTs) for within-object relative to between-object conditions, was observed in the short-ISI (within 500 ms in Experiments 1a, 1b, 2, and 3) conditions while disappearing in the long-ISI (800 ms in Experiment 4) conditions. This result demonstrated that the mere presence of object representation in visual sensory memory, or the sensory memory-maintained object, can serve as an object unit that attention can operate on. This provides evidence for the relationship between object-based attention and visual sensory memory: object representation in visual sensory memory could affect attentional allocation, or attention can operate on a sensory memory-maintained object.
... For example, some studies have examined the neural concomitants underlying the discrimination of affective information (Jiang & He, 2006;Williams, Morris, McGlone, Abbott, & Mattingley, 2004) and stimulus category (Pasley, Mayes, & Schultz, 2004;Fang & He, 2005;Hesselmann & Malach, 2011;Ludwig & Hesselmann, 2015;Hesselmann et al., 2018; of suppressed stimuli. Other research has assessed the effect of suppressed stimuli on psychophysical performance and neural activity, including the effects on object-based guidance of attention (Chou & Yeh, 2012), adaptation aftereffects (Gilroy & Blake, 2005;Moradi, Koch, & Shimojo, 2005;O'Shea & Crassini, 1981), numeric priming (Hesselmann, Darcy, Sterzer, & Knops, 2014), semantic priming (Kang et al., 2011), orientation discrimination (Hung, Nieh, & Hsieh, 2016), the classification of objects (Almeida, Mahon, Nakayama, & Caramazza, 2008) and the discrimination between word and nonwords (Zimba & Blake, 1983). Outside of unconscious processing, interocular suppression techniques are also used to study clinical populations (e.g., amblyopia; Gao et al., 2018), measure sensory eye dominance and induce short-term monocular deprivation (Kim, Kim, & Blake, 2017). ...
In continuous flash suppression (CFS), an image presented to one eye is suppressed from awareness by a dynamic image masker presented to the other eye. Previous studies report that face stimuli break out of CFS more readily when they are oriented upright and contain ecologically relevant information such as facial expressions or direct eye gaze, potentially implicating face processing in the mechanisms of interocular competition. It is unknown, however, whether face content helps to drive interocular suppression when incorporated into the dynamic masker itself, either by engaging higher-level visual mechanisms that underlie face detection or due to lower-level image features that the faces happen to contain. To investigate this, we devised a dynamic mask composed of upright faces and tested how well it suppressed detection of face or grating targets presented to the other eye. Relative contributions of higher-level and lower-level features were compared by manipulating the image properties of the mask. Results show that the dynamic face mask is strikingly effective at suppressing sensory input presented to the opposing eye, but its effectiveness is largely attributable to image texture, which can be quantified in terms of image entropy and edge density. This is because strong suppression was still observed following phase-scrambling or spatial inversion of the face elements, and while a target-selective effect was observed for the face mask, inverting the face elements to interfere with configural processing did not significantly diminish this effect. Thus, visual properties of faces, such as their image entropy and complex phase structure, predominate in driving interocular suppression rather than face detection per se.
... However, this does not imply that visual consciousness is required for visual-to-auditory enhancement. Unconscious vision-of a picture masked by CFS-is still capable of driving object-based visual attention (Chou and Yeh 2012). It is possible that unconscious vision could drive auditory attention. ...
It has been established that lip reading improves the perception of auditory speech. But does seeing objects themselves help us hear better the sounds they make? Here we report a series of psychophysical experiments in humans showing that the visual enhancement of auditory sensitivity is not confined to speech. We further show that the crossmodal enhancement was associated with the conscious visualization of the stimulus: we can better hear the sounds an object makes when we are conscious of seeing that object. Our work extends an intriguing crossmodal effect, previously circumscribed to speech, to a wider domain of real-world objects, and suggests that consciousness contributes to this effect.
... In human and nonhuman primate research, one variant of interocular suppression that has been particularly valuable in teasing apart the neural processes underlying the suppression or awareness of visual stimuli is flash suppression. In this paradigm perceptual invisibility of a stimulus presented to one eye is generated when a second, "rivaling" stimulus is flashed at either the same position as the other eye (Lansing, 1964;McDougall, 1901;Wolfe, 1984) Finally, subjects respond faster to images of objects that they previously encountered during perceptual suppression (Chou & Yeh, 2012); ...
This review in memoriam of Jack Pettigrew provides an overview of past and current research into the phenomenon of multistable perception across multiple animal species. Multistable perception is characterized by two or more perceptual interpretations spontaneously alternating, or rivalling, when animals are exposed to stimuli with inherent sensory ambiguity. There is a wide array of ambiguous stimuli across sensory modalities, ranging from the configural changes observed in simple line drawings, such as the famous Necker cube, to the alternating perception of entire visual scenes that can be instigated by interocular conflict. The latter phenomenon, called binocular rivalry, in particular caught the attention of the late Jack Pettigrew, who combined his interest in the neuronal basis of perception with a unique comparative biological approach that considered ambiguous sensation as a fundamental problem of sensory systems that has shaped the brain throughout evolution. Here, we examine the research findings on visual perceptual alternation and suppression in a wide variety of species including insects, fish, reptiles and primates. We highlight several interesting commonalities across species and behavioral indicators of perceptual alternation. In addition, we show how the comparative approach provides new avenues for understanding how the brain suppresses opposing sensory signals and generates alternations in perceptual dominance.
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... This definition indicates that the attention is based on objects. Actually, some studies [7,8,37] in psychophysics and biology fields as well as some inter-discipline studies in neuro image filed [63] and brain image field [34] also claim the object-based attention. Especially, Chou [8] provides the evidence of object-based attention. ...
... Actually, some studies [7,8,37] in psychophysics and biology fields as well as some inter-discipline studies in neuro image filed [63] and brain image field [34] also claim the object-based attention. Especially, Chou [8] provides the evidence of object-based attention. These studies provide the strong theory support for defining human attention as objects. ...
The first attention model in the computer science community is proposed in 1998. In the following years, human attention has been intensively studied. However, these studies mainly refer human attention as the image regions that draw the attention of a human (outside the image) who is looking at the image. In this paper, we infer the attention of a human inside a third-person view video where the human is doing a task, and define human attention as attentional objects that coincide with the task the human is doing. To infer human attention, we propose a deep neural network model that fuses both low-level human pose cue and high-level task encoding cue. Due to the lack of appropriate public datasets for studying this problem, we newly collect a video dataset in complex Virtual-Reality (VR) scenes. In the experiments, we widely compare our method with three other methods on this VR dataset. In addition, we re-annotate a public real dataset and conduct the extensional experiments on this real dataset. The experiment results validate the effectiveness of our method.
... Many theories, such as the Global Workspace Theory (Baars, 1988), the Information Integration Theory (Tononi, 2005) and the Intermediate Level Theory (Jackendoff, 1987), have proposed that attention is a mechanism through which information enters consciousness. However, in the field of visual awareness, mounting evidence indicates an interdependency between attention and consciousness (spatial attention (Wyart et al., 2011;Wyart and Tallon-Baudry, 2008), feature based attention (Kanai et al., 2006;Schmidt and Schmidt, 2010), object attention (Chou and Yeh, 2012;Norman et al., 2013) and for reviews see (lv and wang, 2016;Tsuchiya and van Boxtel, 2013)). Previously (Y. ...
Understanding and predicting the intentions of others through limb movements are vital to social interaction. The processing of biological motion is unique from the processing of motion of inanimate objects. Presently, there is controversy over whether visual consciousness of biological motion is regulated by visual attention. In addition, the neural mechanisms involved in biological motion-related visual awareness are not known. In the current study, the relationship between visual awareness (aware vs unaware), represented by a point-light walker and biological-motion-based attention, manipulated by a difference in congruence (congruent, incongruent) between the direction of a pre-cue and that of biological motion was explored. The neural mechanisms involved in processing the stimuli were explored through electroencephalography. Both early (50–150 ms, 100–200 ms, and 174–226 ms after target presentation) and late (350–550 ms after target presentation) awareness-related neural processings were observed during a biological motion-based congruency task. Early processing was localized to occipital–parietal regions, such as the left postcentral gyrus, the left middle occipital gyrus, and the right precentral gyrus. In the 174–226-ms window, the activity in the occipital region was gradually replaced by activity in the parietal and frontal regions. Late processing was localized to frontal–parietal regions, such as the right dorsal superior frontal gyrus, the left medial superior frontal gyrus, and the occipito-temporal regions. Congruency-related processing occurred in the 246–260-ms window and was localized to the right superior occipital gyrus. In summary, due to its complexity, biological motion awareness has a unique neural basis.
