LAUSR.org creates dashboard-style pages of related content for over 1.5 million academic articles. Sign Up to like articles & get recommendations!

Sensitivity measures of visuospatial attention.

Photo from wikipedia

Measuring visual sensitivity has become popular to determine the spatial deployment of visual attention. Critically, the accuracy of the measurement depends on the quality of the stimulus used. We evaluated… Click to show full abstract

Measuring visual sensitivity has become popular to determine the spatial deployment of visual attention. Critically, the accuracy of the measurement depends on the quality of the stimulus used. We evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of six commonly used stimuli for assessing visual attention. While preparing an eye movement to a cued item, participants discriminated a stimulus-specific visual feature, either at the cued location or at other equidistant uncued locations. Stimuli differed in their visual features (digital letters, Gabors, crosses, pink noise, random dot kinematograms, and Gabor streams) and their presentation mode (static or dynamic stimuli). We evaluated these stimuli regarding their temporal and spatial specificity and their impact on saccade preparation. We assessed presaccadic visual sensitivity as a correlate of visual spatial attention and discuss the stimulus-specific time course, spatial specificity, and magnitude of the measured attention modulation. Irrespective of the stimulus type, we observed a clear increase of visual sensitivity at the cued location. Time course, spatial specificity, and magnitude of this improvement, however, were specific to each stimulus. Based on our findings, we present guidelines to select the stimulus best suited to measure visuospatial attention depending on the respective research question.

Keywords: visual sensitivity; stimulus; sensitivity; spatial specificity; attention; visuospatial attention

Journal Title: Journal of vision
Year Published: 2019

Link to full text (if available)


Share on Social Media:                               Sign Up to like & get
recommendations!

Related content

More Information              News              Social Media              Video              Recommended



                Click one of the above tabs to view related content.