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Updated: Oct 21, 2025
Measuring Attention and Visual Processing Speed by Model-based Analysis of Temporal-order Judgments
Published on: January 23, 2017
Towards understanding how we pay attention in naturalistic visual search settings
Nora Turoman1, Ruxandra I Tivadar2, Chrysa Retsa3
1The LINE (Laboratory for Investigative Neurophysiology), Department of Radiology, Lausanne University Hospital and University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland; MEDGIFT Lab, Institute of Information Systems, School of Management, HES-SO Valais-Wallis University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Techno-Pôle 3, 3960 Sierre, Switzerland; Working Memory, Cognition and Development lab, Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Attention is influenced by goals, multisensory input, and context. Stimulus meaning and predictability interact to guide attention, suggesting a broader role for context in attentional control beyond simple goals.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Psychology
Background:
- Attentional control research traditionally focuses on single senses and behavioral goals.
- Everyday environments are multisensory and contain regularities that likely influence attention.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how visual attentional capture is affected by top-down goals, multisensory stimuli, and contextual factors like semantic relationships and temporal predictability.
- To examine the interplay of these factors in controlling attention.
Main Methods:
- A multisensory spatial cueing paradigm was used, measuring reaction times and 129-channel event-related potentials (ERPs).
- Manipulated were goal-relevance, multisensory nature of distractors (visual alone vs. visual+auditory), semantic congruence between sound and color, and temporal predictability.
- Analyzed the distractor-elicited N2pc component using canonical and multivariate electrical neuroimaging.
Main Results:
- Behaviorally, arbitrary target-matching distractors captured attention more than semantically congruent ones.
- No evidence was found for context modulating multisensory enhancements of attentional capture behaviorally.
- Electrical neuroimaging revealed context-based influences on attention to both visual and multisensory distractors, affecting brain activation strength and network engagement, occurring earlier than the N2pc component.
Conclusions:
- Stimulus meaning and temporal predictability significantly modulate attentional selection and interact with each other.
- Meaning serves as a crucial contextual factor, alongside temporal predictability, in facilitating goal-directed behavior.
- Attentional control theories need revision to incorporate the complex interplay of goals, perceptual salience, meaning, and predictability in multisensory environments.
