Greater Disruption Due to Failure of Inhibitory Control on an Ambiguous Distractor

Considerable evidence indicates that a stimulus that is subthreshold, and thus consciously invisible, influences brain activity and behavioral performance. However, it is not clear how subthreshold stimuli are processed in the brain. We found that a task-irrelevant subthreshold coherent motion led to a stronger disturbance in task performance than did suprathreshold motion. With the subthreshold motion, activity in the visual cortex measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging was higher, but activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex was lower, than with suprathreshold motion. These results suggest that subthreshold irrelevant signals are not subject to effective inhibitory control.

[1]  ROBERT FOX,et al.  Adaptation to invisible gratings and the site of binocular rivalry suppression , 1974, Nature.

[2]  Ronald A. Rensink,et al.  Change-blindness as a result of ‘mudsplashes’ , 1999, Nature.

[3]  R. Desimone,et al.  Neural mechanisms of selective visual attention. , 1995, Annual review of neuroscience.

[4]  R. Knight,et al.  Prefrontal cortex regulates inhibition and excitation in distributed neural networks. , 1999, Acta psychologica.

[5]  G. Rees,et al.  Predicting the orientation of invisible stimuli from activity in human primary visual cortex , 2005, Nature Neuroscience.

[6]  E. Delong,et al.  The Subseafloor Biosphere at Mid-Ocean Ridges , 2004 .

[7]  T. Robbins,et al.  Dissociation in prefrontal cortex of affective and attentional shifts , 1996, Nature.

[8]  Shinobu Masaki,et al.  When meaningless symbols become letters: Neural activity change in learning new phonograms , 2005, NeuroImage.

[9]  D. Wilkin,et al.  Neuron , 2001, Brain Research.

[10]  C. Blakemore,et al.  Is experimental motion blindness due to sensory suppression? An ERP approach. , 2002, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[11]  J. Stroop.  Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. , 1992 .

[12]  Leslie G. Ungerleider,et al.  Posterior parietal cortex and the filtering of distractors , 2003, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[13]  宁北芳,et al.  疟原虫var基因转换速率变化导致抗原变异[英]／Paul H, Robert P, Christodoulou Z, et al//Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A , 2005 .

[14]  D. Karl.  The microbiology of deep-sea hydrothermal vents , 1995 .

[15]  A. Treisman,et al.  A feature-integration theory of attention , 1980, Cognitive Psychology.

[16]  N. Logothetis,et al.  Neuronal correlates of subjective visual perception. , 1989, Science.

[17]  Aaron R. Seitz,et al.  Psychophysics: Is subliminal learning really passive? , 2003, Nature.

[18]  Takeo Watanabe,et al.  Perceptual learning without perception , 2001, Nature.

[19]  Karl J. Friston,et al.  A direct quantitative relationship between the functional properties of human and macaque V5 , 2000, Nature Neuroscience.

[20]  Daniel J. Simons,et al.  Inattentional blindness , 2007, Scholarpedia.

[21]  B. Wandell,et al.  Differential sensitivity to words and shapes in ventral occipito-temporal cortex. , 2007, Cerebral cortex.

[22]  Randolph Blake,et al.  Traveling waves of activity in primary visual cortex during binocular rivalry , 2005, Nature Neuroscience.

[23]  Arash Sahraie,et al.  Attention induced motion blindness , 2001, Vision Research.

[24]  J. Schall,et al.  Executive control of countermanding saccades by the supplementary eye field , 2006, Nature Neuroscience.

[25]  E. Miller,et al.  An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. , 2001, Annual review of neuroscience.

[26]  R. Passingham.  The prefrontal cortex: Anatomy physiology and neurophysiology of the frontal lobe J. M. Fuster. Raven Press, New York (1980), 222 pp., $29.92 , 1981, Neuroscience.

[27]  M. Sigman,et al.  The neural code for written words: a proposal , 2005, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[28]  S. Dehaene,et al.  Imaging unconscious semantic priming , 1998, Nature.

[29]  Jonathan D. Cohen,et al.  Anterior Cingulate Conflict Monitoring and Adjustments in Control , 2004, Science.

[30]  M. Chun,et al.  Types and tokens in visual processing: a double dissociation between the attentional blink and repetition blindness. , 1997, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[31]  J. Ashby.  References and Notes , 1999 .

[32]  J. Cohen,et al.  Dissociating the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex in cognitive control. , 2000, Science.

[33]  P. Cavanagh,et al.  Attentional resolution and the locus of visual awareness , 1996, Nature.

[34]  R. Palacios,et al.  Genomes and genomics of nitrogen-fixing organisms , 2005 .