Evidence for an age-related decline in feature-based attention.

Feature-based attention allows to efficiently guide attention to relevant information in the visual scene, but unambiguous empirical evidence on age-related effects is still limited. In this study, young and older participants performed a two-alternative forced choice task in which a response was selected based on a task-relevant number (=target) presented alone or with a task-irrelevant letter (=neutral distracter) or number (=compatible/incompatible distracter). Participants were required to select the target based on color.

The sustained attention to response task: Validation of a non-numerical parallel form.

Many activities in daily life rely on the ability to continuously keep attention on task requirements. Patients with acquired brain injury often suffer from deficits in sustained attention that impact quality of life and complicate rehabilitation. The sustained attention to response task (SART) is a commonly used go/no-go task in the assessment of sustained attention.

Activity in the Fronto-Parietal and Visual Cortex Is Modulated by Feature-Based Attentional Weighting.

In day-to-day dynamic activities where sensory input is abundant, stimulus representations in the visual cortex are modulated based on their attentional priority. Several studies have established the top-down role of a fronto-parietal dorsal attention network in selective attention. In the current study, we aimed to investigate whether activity of subregions of this network and the visual cortex is modulated by feature-based attentional weighting, and if so, whether their timecourses of activity are correlated.

Role of the dorsal attention network in distracter suppression based on features.

Selective attention allows us to prioritize the processing of relevant information and filter out irrelevant information. Human functional neuroimaging and lesion-based studies have highlighted the fronto-parietal dorsal attention network (DAN) as an important network in this process. In this study, we investigated the role of the DAN in distracter suppression by dynamically modifying the priority of visual information (target > high priority distracter > low priority distracter) based on features only.