Current Biology
Volume 22, Issue 11, 5 June 2012, Pages 1000-1004
Journal home page for Current Biology

Report
Attention Samples Stimuli Rhythmically

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.03.054Get rights and content
Under an Elsevier user license
open archive

Summary

Overt exploration or sampling behaviors, such as whisking, sniffing, and saccadic eye movements [1, 2], are often characterized by a rhythm. In addition, the electrophysiologically recorded theta or alpha phase predicts global detection performance [3, 4]. These two observations raise the intriguing possibility that covert selective attention samples from multiple stimuli rhythmically. To investigate this possibility, we measured change detection performance on two simultaneously presented stimuli, after resetting attention to one of them. After a reset flash at one stimulus location, detection performance fluctuated rhythmically. When the flash was presented in the right visual field, a 4 Hz rhythm was directly visible in the time courses of behavioral performance at both stimulus locations, and the two rhythms were in antiphase. A left visual field flash exerted only partial reset on performance and induced rhythmic fluctuation at higher frequencies (6–10 Hz). These findings show that selective attention samples multiple stimuli rhythmically, and they position spatial attention within the family of exploration behaviors [1].

Highlights

► Time course of change detection performance for two stimuli was assessed at 60 Hz ► A flash event provided temporal reset and oriented attention to one stimulus ► After the flash, attention sampled the two stimuli at 4 to 10 Hz ► Following a right visual field flash, sampling alternated between the stimuli

Cited by (0)