Humans can efficiently look for but not select multiple visual objects
- Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Utrecht University, Netherlands
- Birkbeck College, University of London, United Kingdom
Abstract
The human brain recurrently prioritizes task-relevant over task-irrelevant visual information. A central, question is whether multiple objects can be prioritized simultaneously. To answer this, we let observers search for two colored targets among distractors. Crucially, we independently varied the number of target colors that observers anticipated, and the number of target colors actually used to distinguish the targets in the display. This enabled us to dissociate the preparation of selection mechanisms from the actual engagement of such mechanisms. Multivariate classification of electroencephalographic activity allowed us to track selection of each target separately across time. The results revealed only small neural and behavioral costs associated with preparing for selecting two objects, but substantial costs when engaging in selection. Further analyses suggest this cost is the consequence of neural competition resulting in limited parallel processing, rather than a serial bottleneck. The findings bridge diverging theoretical perspectives on capacity limitations of feature-based attention.
Data availability
All data and material will be made freely accessible at https://osf.io/3bn64.
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Data from: Humans can efficiently look for but not select multiple visual objectsOpen Science Framework, 3bn64.
Article and author information
Author details
Johannes Jacobus Fahrenfort
Christian N L Olivers
Funding
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (464-13-003)
- Christian N L Olivers
H2020 European Research Council (ERC-2013-CoG-615423)
- Christian N L Olivers
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All participants gave written informed consent in line with the Declaration of Helsinki. The study was approved by the Scientific and Ethics Review Board of the Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Reference number: VCWE-2016-215).
Copyright
© 2019, Ort et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Humans can efficiently look for but not select multiple visual objects
eLife 8:e49130.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.49130
Further reading
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- Neuroscience
When navigating environments with changing rules, human brain circuits flexibly adapt how and where we retain information to help us achieve our immediate goals.
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- Neuroscience
When holding visual information temporarily in working memory (WM), the neural representation of the memorandum is distributed across various cortical regions, including visual and frontal cortices. However, the role of stimulus representation in visual and frontal cortices during WM has been controversial. Here, we tested the hypothesis that stimulus representation persists in the frontal cortex to facilitate flexible control demands in WM. During functional MRI, participants flexibly switched between simple WM maintenance of visual stimulus or more complex rule-based categorization of maintained stimulus on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results demonstrated enhanced stimulus representation in the frontal cortex that tracked demands for active WM control and enhanced stimulus representation in the visual cortex that tracked demands for precise WM maintenance. This differential frontal stimulus representation traded off with the newly-generated category representation with varying control demands. Simulation using multi-module recurrent neural networks replicated human neural patterns when stimulus information was preserved for network readout. Altogether, these findings help reconcile the long-standing debate in WM research, and provide empirical and computational evidence that flexible stimulus representation in the frontal cortex during WM serves as a potential neural coding scheme to accommodate the ever-changing environment.
