Configuration-Specific Attentional Modulation of Flanker – Target Lateral Interactions

Configuration-specific attentional modulation of flanker- -target lateral interactions.

Elements of a contour are often easier to detect when they possess collinearity, with their local orientations matching the global orientation of the contour. We recently reported attentional modulation of such lateral interactions between a central near-threshold target Gabor patch and flanking high-contrast patches (Freeman et al, 2001 Nature Neuroscience 4 1032-1036). Here, we examined wheth...

Task-dependent modulation of target-flanker lateral interactions in vision.

Visibility of a central target Gabor element often improves in the presence of collinear flankers. Such lateral interactions may reflect fundamental mechanisms underlying the perceptual integration of contours in early vision. We recently reported (Freeman, Sagi, & Driver, 2001) attentional modulation of these interactions. Here, we test whether this modulation is task dependent. Subjects had t...

Attentional Modulation of Emotional Conflict Processing with Flanker Tasks

Emotion processing has been shown to acquire priority by biasing allocation of attentional resources. Aversive images or fearful expressions are processed quickly and automatically. Many existing findings suggested that processing of emotional information was pre-attentive, largely immune from attentional control. Other studies argued that attention gated the processing of emotion. To tackle th...

Lateral modulation of contrast discrimination: flanker orientation effects.

We used a dual-masking paradigm to study how contrast discrimination is influenced by the presence of adjacent stimuli differing in orientation. The task of the observer was to detect a vertical Gabor target superimposed on a vertical Gabor pedestal in the presence of flankers. The Gabor flankers had orientations ranging from 0 degrees (parallel to the target) to 90 degrees (orthogonal). The fl...

Psychophysical Measurement of Attentional Modulation in Low-level Vision Using the Lateral-interactions Paradigm