Time matters: Feature-specific prioritization follows feature integration in visual object processing.

Objects represent a fundamental selection unit of visual attention. However, at odds with the integrated competition account, our recent study demonstrated that attentional facilitation of constituent features does not spread automatically within an object, but instead depends on the specific task relevance of each feature. Here, we employed a novel experimental design, allowing simultaneous electrophysiological measurements of the allocation of attention to two distinct features (rotation and color) within one object (a square) during both trial-wise and block-wise cued shifts of attention.

Attentional Facilitation of Constituent Features of an Object Does Not Spread Automatically along Object-defining Cortical Boundaries.

The integrated object account predicts that attention is spread across all features that constitute one object, regardless of their task relevance. We challenge that prediction with a novel stimulation technique that allows for simultaneous electrophysiological measurements of the allocation of attention to two distinct features within one object. A rotating square that flickers in different colors evoked two distinct steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) for rotation and color, respectively.

It takes two to tango: Suppression of task-irrelevant features requires (spatial) competition.

In a recent electrophysiological study, we reported on global facilitation but local suppression of color stimuli in feature-based attention in human early visual cortex. Subjects attended to one of two centrally located superimposed red/blue random dot kinematograms (RDKs). Task-irrelevant single RDKs in the same colors were presented in the left and right periphery, respectively.

Impaired awareness of action-outcome contingency and causality during healthy ageing and following ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions.

Detecting causal relationships between actions and their outcomes is fundamental to guiding goal-directed behaviour. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) has been extensively implicated in computing these environmental contingencies, via animal lesion models and human neuroimaging. However, whether the vmPFC is critical for contingency learning, and whether it can occur without subjective awareness of those contingencies, has not been established.

Blame it on the bossa nova: Transfer of perceived sexiness from music to touch.

Emotion elicited through music transfers to subsequent processing of facial expressions. Music may accordingly function as a social technology by promoting social bonding. Here, we investigated whether music would cross-modally influence the perception of sensual touch, a behavior related to mating.