ArticleJournal of vision2017
Evidence for unlimited capacity processing of simple features in visual cortex.
Article in Journal of vision, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- Monocular advantage for multiple object tracking.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Spatial attention selectively alters visual cortical representation during target anticipation.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Spatial selectivity in visual detection suffers when attention is divided.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Oscillations in an artificial neural network convert competing inputs into a temporal code.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Severe processing capacity limits for sub-lexical features of letter strings.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
- Testing hemifield independence for divided attention in visual object tasks.Journal of vision · 2023Article
- Efficient allocation of attentional sensitivity gain in visual cortex reduces foveal sensitivity in visual search.Current biology : CB · 2022Article
- A major role for retrieval and/or comparison in the set-size effects of change detection.Journal of vision · 2021Article
- Is there a serial bottleneck in visual object recognition?Journal of vision · 2021Article
- Pupillary dilation elicited by attending to two disks with different luminance.Journal of vision · 2021Article
- Visual word recognition: Evidence for a serial bottleneck in lexical access.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2020Article
- Parallel spatial channels converge at a bottleneck in anterior word-selective cortex.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Having More Choices Changes How Human Observers Weight Stable Sensory Evidence.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2018Article
- Tracking the Dynamics of Mind Wandering: Insights from Pupillometry.Journal of cognition · 2018Article
- Evidence of Serial Processing in Visual Word Recognition.Psychological science · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Performance in many visual tasks is impaired when observers attempt to divide spatial attention across multiple visual field locations. Correspondingly, neuronal response magnitudes in visual cortex are often reduced during divided compared with focused spatial attention. This suggests that early visual cortex is the site of capacity limits, where finite processing resources must be divided among attended stimuli. However, behavioral research demonstrates that not all visual tasks suffer such capacity limits: The costs of divided attention are minimal when the task and stimulus are simple, such as when searching for a target defined by orientation or contrast. To date, however, every neuroimaging study of divided attention has used more complex tasks and found large reductions in response magnitude. We bridged that gap by using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure responses in the human visual cortex during simple feature detection. The first experiment used a visual search task: Observers detected a low-contrast Gabor patch within one or four potentially relevant locations. The second experiment used a dual-task design, in which observers made independent judgments of Gabor presence in patches of dynamic noise at two locations. In both experiments, blood-oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals in the retinotopic cortex were significantly lower for ignored than attended stimuli. However, when observers divided attention between multiple stimuli, BOLD signals were not reliably reduced and behavioral performance was unimpaired. These results suggest that processing of simple features in early visual cortex has unlimited capacity.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.