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Neural mechanisms of visual selective attention

HUANG Ling, LI Meng-Sha, WANG Li-Juan, ZHANG Xi-Lin^*

School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China

Abstract

Because of a limited capacity of information processing in the brain, the efficient processing of visual information requires selecting only a very small fraction of visual inputs at any given moment in time. Attention is the main mechanism that controls this selection process, namely selective attention. Selective attention is the mechanism by which the subset of incoming information is preferentially processed from the complex external environment. Research on selective attention has two key issues. One is what targets (inputs) are selected by attention. There are three different types of selective attention according to its selected target: space-based, feature-based, and object-based attention. Another issue is how selective attention is generated. There are two different types of selective attention according to its generating source: top-down and bottom-up attention. In this review, these two issues are introduced to systematically discuss the neural mechanism of visual selective attention.

Key words: space-based attention; feature-based attention; object-based attention; top-down attention; bottom-up attention

Received: 2018-06-15　　Accepted: 2019-01-17

Corresponding author: 张喜淋　　E-mail: xlzhang@m.scnu.edu.cn

DOI: 10.13294/j.aps.2019.0005

Citing This Article：

HUANG Ling, LI Meng-Sha, WANG Li-Juan, ZHANG Xi-Lin. Neural mechanisms of visual selective attention. Acta Physiol Sin 2019; 71 (1): 11-21 (in Chinese with English abstract).