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Onur Gntrkn
Rules of Perception
At any point in time, countless stimuli are detected by our sensory
systems and compete for our attention. If our attentional system
would not be limited, we would not need a process of stimulus
selection. In this course we will present some of the rules that
govern our selection.
This process of selection is composed of two major systems:
The first is the bottom-up system. It is stimulus-driven and thus
relies on the properties of the input (brightness, salience, size,
movement etc.). We attend to them whether we want to or not.
Bottom-up attention depends on the properties of the ascending
sensory pathways.
The second is a top-down system. It is goal-driven and relies on
past learning and the current motivation. We know what we are
looking for. Top-down attention is mostly mediated by prefrontal
and
basal-ganglia
systems.
Desimone,
R. and Duncan,
J., Neural mechanisms of selective visual attention, Annual Rev.
Neurosci. 1995. 18:193-222.
competitive
selection
Retinal eccentricity
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Ampel
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Amsel
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Aster
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Alster
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Auster
rods
cones
Take home message: Our visual resolution dramatically drops with retinal
eccentricity: we only see a tiny fragment of our vision in high resolution.
competitive
selection
Ultrashort memory
Retinal eccentricity
X
50 ms
1 sec.
1 sec.
The shorter the delay, the higher the probability that we report the full display.
Take home message: We have an ultrashort memory that vanishes after a
few hundred milliseconds. Probably this ultrashort memory (sometimes also
called sensory memory) glues saccadic images into a coherent and large
picture. We are deceived to think that this large picture (which is mostly
constituted by our sensory memory) is actually what we see.
1 sec.
competitive
selection
tectum opticum
(superior colliculus)
Imc
Ipc
Tectum opticum
Imc
Ipc
Tectum opticum
Tectum
cellular activity
visual field
time
Tectum
cellular activity
visual field
time
competitive
selection
200 ms
50 ms
ORIentation
LO-Unilateral
LO-Bilateral
200 ms
LUMinance
time
Beste, C., Wascher, E., Gntrkn, O. and Dinse, H. R., Feature specific Hebbian learning
biases attentional selection, Current Biol., 2011, 21: 876-882
Baseline
512 Trials
Stimulation
200 ms
LUMinance
ORIentation
LO-Unilateral
LO-Bilateral
time
200 ms
50 ms
Post 1
90 min
Post 2
24 h
Post 3
10 T
1 Hz
5 sec
20 Hz
5 sec
etc.
LTP-like
etc.
40 Min.
40 Min.
LTD-like
competitive
selection
Feature selection
Treisman AM. Gormican S. 1988. Feature analysis in early vision: evidence from search
asymmetries. Psychol. Rev. 95 : 15-48
competitive
selection
Feature selection
Prefrontal Cortex
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2
Prefrontal Cortex
Delay period
Remember this!!
Forget it!!
Rose J, Colombo M., Neural correlates of executive control in the avian brain. PLoS
Biol. 2005 (6):e190
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Durstewitz, D., Kelc, M. and Gntrkn, O., A neurocomputational theory of the dopaminergic
modulation of working memory functions, J. Neurosci., 1999, 19, 2807-2822.
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Summary
Our visual resolution dramatically drops with retinal eccentricity:
we only see a tiny fragment of our vision in high resolution and we
see it color-weak.
We have an ultrashort memory that glues these saccadic images
into a coherent and large picture.
Stimuli compete at brainstem level by a winner-take-all system,
such that only few objects are processed in the ascending sensory
systems. These few objects capture all of our attention. This
selection is done both by bottom up (by the relative saliency of the
stimuli), and/or by top down projections.
Competitive mechanisms of sensory selection can be tuned in a
specific way and for lengthy periods of time by synaptic
strengthening (LTP-like) or weakening (LTD-like).
At some point between input and response, objects in the visual
input compete for representation, analysis, or control. The
competition is biased, however, towards information that is
currently relevant for behavior. Attended stimuli make demands
on
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processing capacity, while unattended ones often do not.