Probing the Role of Feature Dimension Maps in Visual Cognition: Manipulations of Relevant Locations on Salience Processing? (Expt 3.1 Pilot)

Official title

Probing the Role of Feature Dimension Maps in Visual Cognition: Expt 3.1 (Pilot)

Overview

How do we know what's important to look at in the environment? Sometimes, we need to look at objects because they are 'salient' (for example, bright flashing lights of a police car, or the stripes of a venomous animal), while other times, we need to ignore irrelevant salient locations and focus only on locations we know to be 'relevant'. These behaviors are often explained by the use of 'priority maps' which index the relative importance of different locations in the visual environment based on both their salience and relevance. In this research, we aim to understand how these factors interact when determining what's important to look at. Specifically, we are evaluating the extent to which the visual system considers locations that are known to be irrelevant when considering the salience of objects. We're testing the hypothesis that the visual system always computes maps of salient locations within 'feature maps', but that activity from these maps is not read out to guide behavior for task-irrelevant locations. We'll have people look at displays containing colored shapes and/or moving dots and report aspects of the visual stimulus (e.g., orientation of a line within a particular stimulus). We'll measure response times across conditions in which we manipulate the presence/absence of salient distracting stimuli and provide various kinds of cues about the potential relevance of different locations on the screen. The rationale is that by measuring changes in visual search behavior (and thus inferring computations performed on brain representations), we will determine how these aspects of simplified visual environments impact the brain's representation of important object locations. This will support future studies using brain imaging techniques aimed at identifying the neural mechanisms supporting the extraction of salient and relevant locations from visual scenes, which can inform future diagnosis/treatment of disorders which can impact our ability to perform visual search (e.g., schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease).

Interventions

• Other Stimulus Properties: Target Location
  The location of the target item in the display will be varied across trials (appear left, right, up, or down)
• Other Stimulus Properties: Distractor Presence
  A proportion of all trials will contain a task-irrelevant, singleton distractor defined in a non-target dimension (e.g., color target and motion distractor)
• Other Stimulus properties: Cue Validity
  Varied across trials, the validity of the cue will be determined by the match or mismatch between direction of the visual cue (an arrowhead around the fixation pointing to the right, left, up, or down) and actual target location

Primary outcome measures

• Behavioral response (button press) [Time frame: Through study completion, an average of two weeks]
• Gaze position [Time frame: Through study completion, an average of two weeks]

Eligibility criteria

Inclusion criteria

• between 18 and 55 years of age
• normal or corrected-to-normal vision

Exclusion criteria

• N/A

Criteria are shown verbatim from the registry (in English). Final eligibility is always assessed by the study center.

Healthy volunteers: Yes

Study design

Allocation

N/A

Model

Single group

Masking

Open label

Primary purpose

Basic science

Study locations

United States · 1 center

• University of California, Santa Barbara — Santa Barbara

Publications

• Mackey WE, Winawer J, Curtis CE. Visual field map clusters in human frontoparietal cortex. Elife. 2017 Jun 19;6:e22974. doi: 10.7554/eLife.22974. PMID 28628004
• Hallenbeck GE, Sprague TC, Rahmati M, Sreenivasan KK, Curtis CE. Working memory representations in visual cortex mediate distraction effects. Nat Commun. 2021 Aug 5;12(1):4714. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-24973-1. PMID 34354071
• Sprague TC, Itthipuripat S, Vo VA, Serences JT. Dissociable signatures of visual salience and behavioral relevance across attentional priority maps in human cortex. J Neurophysiol. 2018 Jun 1;119(6):2153-2165. doi: 10.1152/jn.00059.2018. Epub 2018 Feb 28. PMID 29488841
• Sprague TC, Adam KCS, Foster JJ, Rahmati M, Sutterer DW, Vo VA. Inverted Encoding Models Assay Population-Level Stimulus Representations, Not Single-Unit Neural Tuning. eNeuro. 2018 Jun 5;5(3):ENEURO.0098-18.2018. doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0098-18.2018. eCollection 2018 May-Jun. No abstract available. PMID 29876523
• Sprague TC, Boynton GM, Serences JT. The Importance of Considering Model Choices When Interpreting Results in Computational Neuroimaging. eNeuro. 2019 Dec 20;6(6):ENEURO.0196-19.2019. doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0196-19.2019. Print 2019 Nov/Dec. PMID 31772033
• Laumann TO, Gordon EM, Adeyemo B, Snyder AZ, Joo SJ, Chen MY, Gilmore AW, McDermott KB, Nelson SM, Dosenbach NU, Schlaggar BL, Mumford JA, Poldrack RA, Petersen SE. Functional System and Areal Organization of a Highly Sampled Individual Human Brain. Neuron. 2015 Aug 5;87(3):657-70. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.06.037. Epub 2015 Jul 23. PMID 26212711
• Allen EJ, St-Yves G, Wu Y, Breedlove JL, Prince JS, Dowdle LT, Nau M, Caron B, Pestilli F, Charest I, Hutchinson JB, Naselaris T, Kay K. A massive 7T fMRI dataset to bridge cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Nat Neurosci. 2022 Jan;25(1):116-126. doi: 10.1038/s41593-021-00962-x. Epub 2021 Dec 16. PMID 34916659
• Fedorenko E. The early origins and the growing popularity of the individualsubject analytic approach in human neuroscience. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. 2021; 40:105-112.

Identifiers

NCT: NCT06852521 · 10-25-0048: 3.1 (Pilot) · R01EY035300

Primary sources (government registries)

• ClinicalTrials.gov (US NIH)

View this study on ClinicalTrials.gov ↗