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Published April 1999 | public
Journal Article

Attention activates winner-take-all competition among visual filters

Abstract

Shifting attention away from a visual stimulus reduces, but does not abolish, visual discrimination performance. This residual vision with 'poor' attention can be compared to normal vision with 'full' attention to reveal how attention alters visual perception. We report large differences between residual and normal visual thresholds for discriminating the orientation or spatial frequency of simple patterns, and smaller differences for discriminating contrast. A computational model, in which attention activates a winner-take-all competition among overlapping visual filters, quantitatively accounts for all observations. Our model predicts that the effects of attention on visual cortical neurons include increased contrast gain as well as sharper tuning to orientation and spatial frequency.

Additional Information

RECEIVED 24 NOVEMBER 1998; ACCEPTED 24 FEBRUARY 1999. Supported by NSF, NIMH, ONR and the NSF-ERC at Caltech. We thank T. Albright and T. Sejnowski for access to facilities and J. Gallant, A. Manwani, S. Shimojo, K. Watanabe and B. Zenger for comments and discussions.

Additional details

Created:
September 15, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023