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Attention activates winner-take-all competition among visual filters

Nature Neuroscience volume 2, pages 375–381 (1999)Cite this article

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.

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Figure 1: Measurement of visual thresholds with either full or poor attention.
Figure 2: Single- and double-task thresholds compared.
Figure 3: Three-stage model of visual filters and their interactions (schematic).
Figure 4: Predicted thresholds when attention changes some model parameters but not others.
Figure 5: Effect of attention on early visual processing.
Figure 6: Attentional change in the response distribution.

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Acknowledgements

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.

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Author notes

  1. D.K. Lee and L. Itti: The first two authors contributed equally to this study.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computation and Neural Systems 139–74, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, 91125, California, USA

    D.K. Lee, L. Itti, C. Koch & J. Braun

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  1. D.K. Lee
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  2. L. Itti
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  4. J. Braun
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Correspondence to J. Braun.

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Lee, D., Itti, L., Koch, C. et al. Attention activates winner-take-all competition among visual filters . Nat Neurosci 2, 375–381 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/7286

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