— Motivated Cognition Lab

New paper in JOCN

Experiments from Daniele’s masters and Giacomo’s internship will appear in a paper in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience!

Here’s a preprint.

Ultrafast object detection in naturalistic vision relies on ultrafast distractor suppression.

Hickey, Pollicino, Bertazzoli, and Barbaro

People are quicker to detect examples of real-world object categories in natural scenes than is predicted by classic attention theories. One explanation for this puzzle suggests that experience renders the visual system sensitive to mid-level features diagnosing target presence. These are detected without the need for spatial attention, much as occurs for targets defined by low-level features like color or orientation. The alternative is that naturalistic search relies on spatial attention but is highly efficient because global scene information can be used to quickly reject non-target objects and locations. Here, we use ERPs to differentiate between these possibilities. Results show that hallmark evidence of ultrafast target detection in frontal brain activity is preceded by an index of spatially-specific distractor suppression in visual cortex. Naturalistic search for heterogenous targets therefore appears to rely on spatial operations that act on neural object representations, as predicted by classic attention theory. Participants appear able to rapidly reject non-target objects and locations in order to constrain naturalistic search and increase search efficiency, possibly reflecting the use of global scene information.