Trends in Cognitive Sciences
ReviewEvent-related potential studies of attention
Section snippets
Evidence for early selection
Perhaps the most fundamental question about attention is whether attention modulates information processing at a sensory stage or at a later stage. There are obvious cases in which attention operates after a stimulus has been perceived; for example, we may see a stimulus and simply choose not to make an overt response to it. It is much more difficult to determine whether attention can sometimes suppress the sensory processing of a stimulus. In fact, it is not clear that traditional behavioral
Neural substrates of early selection
As described in Box 3, it is extremely difficult to localize the neural generator sources of an ERP component. However, significant progress has recently been made in identifying the neural origins of the ERP attention effects, particularly the P1 modulation. First, it has been possible to demonstrate that an earlier ERP component called the C1 wave is generated in striate cortex (area V1; see Box 3)15., 16. but is not influenced by attention17., 18., 19.. This finding indicates that attention
Early selection in other paradigms
The ERP studies described so far have primarily used variants of the experimental paradigm shown in Fig. 1, but this is not a paradigm that has been widely used in traditional cognitive studies of attention. However, similar results have been observed with more common tasks such as spatial cuing3., 8., 30. and visual search31., 32..
In spatial cuing studies, a cue stimulus directs the subject to attend to a particular location on each trial, and a target is then presented either at the attended
Late selection in dual-task paradigms
Selection occurs at early stages of processing under some conditions, but there are many conditions under which both attended and unattended stimuli are fully identified and attention operates at a post-perceptual stage. Lavie47., 48. has proposed that selection operates at an early stage only under conditions of high perceptual load. This makes sense: why should attention suppress the perception of an unattended stimulus unless the perceptual system is overloaded? Luck and Hillyard11 have
Isolating different cognitive subsystems
Recent ERP studies have supported this conceptualization of attention by showing that attention operates in different cognitive subsystems for different tasks. In particular, the early-selection studies described in the preceding sections have been complemented by ERP studies of two paradigms in which attention would be expected to operate at later stages, namely the attentional blink paradigm and the psychological refractory period paradigm. These paradigms are very different from those used
ERP support for a multiple subsystems view
This theoretical analysis of the attentional blink and psychological refractory period paradigms has been supported by recent ERP experiments (see Box 4 for a discussion of the methods necessary for isolating ERPs under conditions of rapid stimulation). In the attentional blink paradigm, a variety of ERP components have been compared to determine the first stage at which processing is suppressed during the attentional blink51., 52.. As illustrated in Fig. 2c, no change in amplitude or latency
Conclusions
Together with the experiments on early selection described at the beginning of this article, these experiments illustrate how ERPs have been used to show that attention can operate in different cognitive subsystems under different conditions. Most existing ERP studies have explored coarsely defined cognitive subsystems (e.g. early versus late), but the excellent temporal resolution of the ERP technique should make finer distinctions possible, especially when appropriate experimental designs are
Acknowledgements
Preparation of this article was supported by grant SBR 98-09126 from the National Science Foundation, by grant MH56877 from the National Institute of Mental Health, and by grant RG0136 from the Human Frontier Science Program.
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