Division and spreading of attention across color

Biological systems must allocate limited perceptual resources to relevant elements in their environment. This often requires simultaneous selection of multiple elements from the same feature dimension (e.g. color). To establish the determinants of divided attentional selection of color, we conducted an experiment that used multicolored displays with four overlapping random dot kinematograms that differed only in hue. We manipulated (i) requirement to focus attention to a single color or divide it between two colors; (ii) distances of distractor hues from target hues in a perceptual color space. We conducted a behavioral and an electroencephalographic experiment, in which each color was tagged by a specific flicker frequency and driving its own steady-state visual evoked potential. Behavioral and neural indices of attention showed several major consistencies. Concurrent selection halved the neural signature of target enhancement observed for single targets, consistent with an approximately equal division of limited resources between two hue-selective foci. Distractors interfered with behavioral performance in a context-dependent fashion but their effects were asymmetric, indicating that perceptual distance did not adequately capture attentional distance. These asymmetries point towards an important role of higher-level mechanisms such as categorization and grouping-by-color in determining the efficiency of attentional allocation in complex, multicolored scenes.