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Updated: May 5, 2026
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Measuring Attention and Visual Processing Speed by Model-based Analysis of Temporal-order Judgments
Published on: January 23, 2017
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Attention sharpens the distinction between expected and unexpected percepts in the visual brain.
Jiefeng Jiang1, Christopher Summerfield, Tobias Egner
1Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, and Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3UD, United Kingdom.
Summary
Attention enhances the brain's ability to detect prediction errors (PEs) by increasing neural pattern differences between expected and unexpected stimuli. This supports the PE-promotion model, clarifying attention's role in visual prediction.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Visual Perception
- Computational Neuroscience
Background:
- Attention and expectation are key factors in visual cognition.
- Neural selectivity increases for attended and expected stimuli.
- The relationship between attention and predictive processing is unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To test whether attention promotes or suppresses perceptual prediction errors (PEs).
- To differentiate between the PE-promotion and PE-suppression models of attention.
- To elucidate the functional relationship between attention and expectation in visual processing.
Main Methods:
- fMRI data acquisition from category-selective visual regions.
- Multivariate neural pattern classification to discriminate expected vs. unexpected stimuli.
- Analysis of classifier performance under attended and unattended conditions.
Main Results:
- Attention significantly enhanced classifier performance in discriminating expected from unexpected stimuli.
- This enhancement was region- and stimulus category-specific.
- Findings supported the PE-promotion model and contradicted the PE-suppression model.
Conclusions:
- Attention increases the precision of prediction errors, supporting the PE-promotion model.
- Attention acts as a mechanism for rapid error correction in visual prediction.
- This clarifies the interplay between attention and expectation in visual cognition.
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