George Michael
Professeur des Universités en Neuropsychologie Cognitive, Clinique & Expérimentale
Département de Psychologie Cognitive & Neuropsychologie
Laboratoire d'Etude des Mécanismes Cognitifs
Université Lyon 2
"Salience-based progression of visual attention in space: insights to extrageniculate mediations through behavioral cues"
Abstract: Major theories pose that visual attention is automatically grabbed by the most salient location in the visual field but, if it does not contain a behavioral-relevant target, it disengages and deploys toward the immediately less salient location, and so forth until a target is found. On the other hand, some influent neurobiological models pose that capture of attention by salient signals largely depends on visual pathways that bypass the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus and the primary visual cortex, i.e., the extrageniculate pathways. Here, the hypothesis that the salience-based progression of attention depends (at least partly) on the extrageniculate pathways is assessed by combining a specifically developed visual search paradigm with techniques usually thought to assess the functions of the extrageniculate pathways (i.e., nasal-temporal asymmetries, S-cone stimuli, masking through binocular rivalry). The results are confirm and extent the above-mentioned hypothesis.
