Sustained selective attention to chromatic information enhances visuocortical gain at the population level

Abstract

Prior work in selective attention research has shown that colour-selective attention enhances neural activity in visuocortical areas sensitive to the attended colour while suppressing activity in areas sensitive to ignored colours. However, it is currently unclear whether this effect is limited to attending to specific colour hues or extends to chromatic information more broadly. To investigate this question, we used steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs) frequency tagging to quantify participants' visuocortical responses to specific elements embedded in arrays of flickering, randomly moving mid-complex patterns. Participants were instructed to attend to either coloured or greyscale patterns while ignoring the others. We found that attending to either coloured or greyscale patterns produced robust increases in ssVEP amplitudes both compared to ignored stimuli and to baseline. There was however no evidence of suppressed responses to ignored patterns. These findings demonstrate that attentional selection based on the presence or absence of chromatic information prompts selectively enhanced visuocortical processing but this selective amplification is not accompanied by suppression of unattended stimuli. Findings are consistent with theoretical notions that predict strong competition between specific exemplars within a given feature dimension, such as red or green, but weak competition between broadly defined stimulus categories, such as chromatic versus non-chromatic.

Keywords: colour-selective attention; feature-based attention; frequency tagging; ssVEP; steady-state visual evoked potential.