The Cuing of Attention to Visual Field Locations: Analysis with ERP Recordings

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during the performance of different types of spatial attention tasks in which an advance cue directed subjects to attend to a particular location in the visual field. In the first experiment, the effects of central and peripheral cues were compared. These two cue types produced similar validity effects for most of the target-elicited ERP components; however, the earliest ERP component (P1) failed to show a validity effect under peripheral cuing. In a second experiment employing only central cues, subjects attempted to detect faint luminance targets following valid cues, invalid cues, or neutral cues that provided no information about the location of the subsequent target. Significant costs and benefits of precuing were observed on signal detectability (d’), and these attention effects were associated with amplitude modulations of early ERP components (P1 and N1) that were localized over lateral occipital cortex. These results provide the strongest evidence to date that modulation of short-latency (80- to 200-msec) activity in the visual cortex is specifically associated with changes in perceptual processing.

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