Biology subjects

Wollenberg, L.

Publications and source records attributed to Wollenberg, L..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2020

Eye and hand movements disrupt attentional control

Voluntary attentional control is the ability to selectively focus on a subset of visual information in the presence of other competing stimuli. While it is well established that this capability is a marker of cognitive control that allows for flexible, goal-driven behavior, it is still an open question how robust it is. In this study we contrasted voluntary attentional control with the most frequent source of automatic, involuntary attentional orienting in daily life--shifts of attention prior to goal-directed eye and hand movements. In a multi-tasking paradigm, we asked participants to attend at a location while planning eye or hand movements elsewhere. We observed that voluntary attentional control suffered with every simultaneous action plan. Crucially, this impairment occurred even when we reduced task difficulty and memory load--factors known to interfere with attentional control. Furthermore, the performance cost was limited to voluntary attention. We observed simultaneous attention benefits at two movement targets without attentional competition between them. This demonstrates that the visual system allows for the concurrent representation of multiple attentional foci. It further reveals that voluntary attentional control is extremely fragile and dominated by automatic, premotor shifts of attention. We propose that action-driven selection disrupts voluntary attention and plays a superordinate role for visual selection.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Sounds are remapped across saccades

To achieve visual space constancy, our brain remaps eye-centered projections of visual objects across saccades. Here, we measured saccade trajectory curvature following the presentation of visual, auditory, and audiovisual distractors in a double-step saccade task to investigate if this stability mechanism also accounts for localized sounds. We found that saccade trajectories systematically curved away from the position at which either a light or a sound was presented, suggesting that both modalities are represented in eye-centered oculomotor centers. Importantly, the same effect was observed when the distractor preceded the execution of the first saccade. These results suggest that oculomotor centers keep track of visual, auditory and audiovisual objects by remapping their eye-centered representations across saccades. Furthermore, they argue for the existence of a supra-modal map which keeps track of multi-sensory object locations across our movements to create an impression of space constancy.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2017

Visual attention is not always spatially coupled to subsequent oculomotor program

The premotor theory of attention postulates that spatial attention arises from the activation of saccade areas and that the deployment of attention is the consequence of motor programming. Yet, attentional and oculomotor processes have been shown to be dissociable at the neuronal level in covert attention tasks. To investigate a potential dissociation at the behavioral level, we instructed human participants to saccade towards one of two nearby, competing saccade cues. The spatial distribution of visual attention was determined using oriented Gabor stimuli presented either at the cue locations, between them or at several other equidistant locations. Results demonstrate that accurate saccades towards one of the cues were associated with presaccadic enhancement of visual sensitivity at the respective saccade endpoint compared to the non-saccaded cue location. In contrast, averaging saccades, landing between the two cues, were not associated with attentional facilitation at the saccade endpoint, ruling out an obligatory coupling of attentional deployment to the oculomotor program. Rather, attention before averaging saccades was equally distributed to the two cued locations. Taken together, our results reveal a spatial dissociation of visual attention and saccade programming. They suggest that the oculomotor program depends on the state of attentional selection before saccade onset, and that saccade averaging arises from unresolved attentional selection.

neuroscience↗