An EEG study of the combined effects of top-down and bottom-up attentional selection under varying task difficulty

We examined the effect of combined top-down and bottom-up attentional control sources, using known attention-related EEG components that are thought to reflect target selection (N2pc) and distractor suppression (P_D ). We used endogenous cues (valid vs. neutral) for top-down attentional control, and salience in the form of color singletons (either the target or a distractor) for bottom-up attentional control in visual search. Crucially, in two experiments, the task was of increasing difficulty, reporting the orientation of a tilted target (Experiment 1), or the position of a small gap within the target among tilted non-targets (Experiment 2). Our results showed strong cueing effects on RT and accuracy in both experiments, demonstrating a general facilitation of responses to validly cued targets. Whereas the processing of salient targets was not improved compared with non-salient targets, the presence of a salient distractor consistently worsened performance. The N2pc and P_D were only observed in trials where targets were preceded by neutral cues in Experiment 1, and for validly cued targets and salient neutrally cued targets in Experiment 2. A cueing effect was found on the P_D in Experiment 1, showing an amplitude reduction in trials where the target was validly cued. These results support the idea that bottom-up attentional allocation occurs only when top-down allocation of attention is absent or inefficient. Therefore, these results indicate that attentional selection and suppression during visual search are both influenced by top-down cueing and give support to theories that focus on the interaction between the two types of attention.