Probing the Role of Feature Dimension Maps in Visual Cognition: Manipulations of Relevant Locations on Salience Processing? (Expt 3.1 Pilot)

NCT06852521 | Enrolling By Invitation

• 2 other identifiers: 10-25-0048: 3.1 (Pilot)R01EY035300
• Study Type: interventional
• Target: 240
• Locations: 1 country
• Sites: 1

Brief Summary

How do we know what's important to look at in the environment? Sometimes, we need to look at objects because they are 'salient' (for example, bright flashing lights of a police car, or the stripes of a venomous animal), while other times, we need to ignore irrelevant salient locations and focus only on locations we know to be 'relevant'. These behaviors are often explained by the use of 'priority maps' which index the relative importance of different locations in the visual environment based on both their salience and relevance. In this research, we aim to understand how these factors interact when determining what's important to look at. Specifically, we are evaluating the extent to which the visual system considers locations that are known to be irrelevant when considering the salience of objects. We're testing the hypothesis that the visual system always computes maps of salient locations within 'feature maps', but that activity from these maps is not read out to guide behavior for task-irrelevant locations. We'll have people look at displays containing colored shapes and/or moving dots and report aspects of the visual stimulus (e.g., orientation of a line within a particular stimulus). We'll measure response times across conditions in which we manipulate the presence/absence of salient distracting stimuli and provide various kinds of cues about the potential relevance of different locations on the screen. The rationale is that by measuring changes in visual search behavior (and thus inferring computations performed on brain representations), we will determine how these aspects of simplified visual environments impact the brain's representation of important object locations. This will support future studies using brain imaging techniques aimed at identifying the neural mechanisms supporting the extraction of salient and relevant locations from visual scenes, which can inform future diagnosis/treatment of disorders which can impact our ability to perform visual search (e.g., schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease).

Conditions

Basic Science: Visual Attention in Healthy Participants; Attention

Outcome Measures

Primary Outcomes (2)

• Behavioral response (button press)

  Participants will be required to report the orientation of a line (horizontal or vertical) within the target via a speeded button press. The specific values of color, shape, and motion will vary randomly from trial to trial. Participants will complete separate sessions with each session directing participants to search for a different target feature dimension.

  Through study completion, an average of two weeks

• Gaze position

  The investigators will use the measured gaze position in (x,y) coordinates to verify stable fixation throughout the experiment. The data will be used to establish gaze fixation and/or track where participants look as they perform the visual search task. Trials with poor fixation performance may be excluded from further analyses.

  Through study completion, an average of two weeks

Study Arms (1)

Manipulations of Relevant Locations (Expt 3.1 Pilot)

EXPERIMENTAL

Participants will complete a visual search task in which they will covertly search for a unique target item based on a specific feature dimension indicated at the start of the experiment (unique color, unique motion direction, unique shape) in an 8 item array. At the beginning of each trial, participants will be visually cued (e.g., an arrowhead around fixation) to the side of the display the target item will appear (left, right, up, down). A proportion of all trials will contain a task-irrelevant, singleton distractor defined in a non-target dimension (e.g., color target and motion distractor)

Other: Stimulus Properties: Target Location; Other: Stimulus Properties: Distractor Presence; Other: Stimulus properties: Cue Validity

Interventions

Stimulus Properties: Target Location OTHER

The location of the target item in the display will be varied across trials (appear left, right, up, or down)

Manipulations of Relevant Locations (Expt 3.1 Pilot)

Stimulus Properties: Distractor Presence OTHER

A proportion of all trials will contain a task-irrelevant, singleton distractor defined in a non-target dimension (e.g., color target and motion distractor)

Manipulations of Relevant Locations (Expt 3.1 Pilot)

Stimulus properties: Cue Validity OTHER

Varied across trials, the validity of the cue will be determined by the match or mismatch between direction of the visual cue (an arrowhead around the fixation pointing to the right, left, up, or down) and actual target location

Manipulations of Relevant Locations (Expt 3.1 Pilot)

Eligibility Criteria

• Age: 18 Years - 55 Years
• Sex: all
• Healthy Volunteers: Yes
• Age Groups: Adult (18-64)

You may qualify if:

• between 18 and 55 years of age
• normal or corrected-to-normal vision

You may not qualify if:

• N/A

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of California, Santa Barbara: lead
• National Eye Institute (NEI): collaborator

Study Sites (1)

University of California, Santa Barbara

Santa Barbara, California, 93117, United States

Location

Related Publications (17)

• Mackey WE, Winawer J, Curtis CE. Visual field map clusters in human frontoparietal cortex. Elife. 2017 Jun 19;6:e22974. doi: 10.7554/eLife.22974.

  PMID: 28628004 BACKGROUND

• Hallenbeck GE, Sprague TC, Rahmati M, Sreenivasan KK, Curtis CE. Working memory representations in visual cortex mediate distraction effects. Nat Commun. 2021 Aug 5;12(1):4714. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-24973-1.

  PMID: 34354071 BACKGROUND

• Sprague TC, Itthipuripat S, Vo VA, Serences JT. Dissociable signatures of visual salience and behavioral relevance across attentional priority maps in human cortex. J Neurophysiol. 2018 Jun 1;119(6):2153-2165. doi: 10.1152/jn.00059.2018. Epub 2018 Feb 28.

  PMID: 29488841 BACKGROUND

• Sprague TC, Adam KCS, Foster JJ, Rahmati M, Sutterer DW, Vo VA. Inverted Encoding Models Assay Population-Level Stimulus Representations, Not Single-Unit Neural Tuning. eNeuro. 2018 Jun 5;5(3):ENEURO.0098-18.2018. doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0098-18.2018. eCollection 2018 May-Jun. No abstract available.

  PMID: 29876523 BACKGROUND

• Sprague TC, Boynton GM, Serences JT. The Importance of Considering Model Choices When Interpreting Results in Computational Neuroimaging. eNeuro. 2019 Dec 20;6(6):ENEURO.0196-19.2019. doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0196-19.2019. Print 2019 Nov/Dec.

  PMID: 31772033 BACKGROUND

• Laumann TO, Gordon EM, Adeyemo B, Snyder AZ, Joo SJ, Chen MY, Gilmore AW, McDermott KB, Nelson SM, Dosenbach NU, Schlaggar BL, Mumford JA, Poldrack RA, Petersen SE. Functional System and Areal Organization of a Highly Sampled Individual Human Brain. Neuron. 2015 Aug 5;87(3):657-70. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.06.037. Epub 2015 Jul 23.

  PMID: 26212711 BACKGROUND

• Allen EJ, St-Yves G, Wu Y, Breedlove JL, Prince JS, Dowdle LT, Nau M, Caron B, Pestilli F, Charest I, Hutchinson JB, Naselaris T, Kay K. A massive 7T fMRI dataset to bridge cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Nat Neurosci. 2022 Jan;25(1):116-126. doi: 10.1038/s41593-021-00962-x. Epub 2021 Dec 16.

  PMID: 34916659 BACKGROUND

• Fedorenko E. The early origins and the growing popularity of the individualsubject analytic approach in human neuroscience. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. 2021; 40:105-112.

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• Naselaris T, Allen E, Kay K. Extensive sampling for complete models of individual brains. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. 2021; 40:45-51.

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• Poldrack RA. Diving into the deep end: a personal reflection on the MyConnectome study. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. 2021; 40:1-4.

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• Pritschet L, Taylor CM, Santander T, Jacobs EG. Applying dense-sampling methods to reveal dynamic endocrine modulation of the nervous system. Curr Opin Behav Sci. 2021 Aug;40:72-78. doi: 10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.01.012. Epub 2021 Feb 25.

  PMID: 35369044 BACKGROUND

• Gratton C, Nelson SM, Gordon EM. Brain-behavior correlations: Two paths toward reliability. Neuron. 2022 May 4;110(9):1446-1449. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2022.04.018.

  PMID: 35512638 BACKGROUND

• Smith PL, Little DR. Small is beautiful: In defense of the small-N design. Psychon Bull Rev. 2018 Dec;25(6):2083-2101. doi: 10.3758/s13423-018-1451-8.

  PMID: 29557067 BACKGROUND

• Sprague TC, Serences JT. Attention modulates spatial priority maps in the human occipital, parietal and frontal cortices. Nat Neurosci. 2013 Dec;16(12):1879-87. doi: 10.1038/nn.3574. Epub 2013 Nov 10.

  PMID: 24212672 BACKGROUND

• Itthipuripat S, Vo VA, Sprague TC, Serences JT. Value-driven attentional capture enhances distractor representations in early visual cortex. PLoS Biol. 2019 Aug 9;17(8):e3000186. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000186. eCollection 2019 Aug.

  PMID: 31398186 BACKGROUND

• Poltoratski S, Tong F. Resolving the Spatial Profile of Figure Enhancement in Human V1 through Population Receptive Field Modeling. J Neurosci. 2020 Apr 15;40(16):3292-3303. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2377-19.2020. Epub 2020 Mar 5.

  PMID: 32139585 BACKGROUND

• Poltoratski S, Ling S, McCormack D, Tong F. Characterizing the effects of feature salience and top-down attention in the early visual system. J Neurophysiol. 2017 Jul 1;118(1):564-573. doi: 10.1152/jn.00924.2016. Epub 2017 Apr 5.

  PMID: 28381491 BACKGROUND

Study Officials

• Tommy C Sprague

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Study Design

• Study Type: interventional
• Phase: not applicable
• Allocation: NA
• Masking: NONE
• Masking Details: Participants will typically be unaware of the conditions presented, though because these involve manipulations of stimuli or task demands, they may be aware of the manipulation. This is not expected to impact the primary outcome measures (e.g., behavioral performance).
• Purpose: BASIC SCIENCE
• Intervention Model: SINGLE GROUP
• Sponsor Type: OTHER
• Responsible Party: SPONSOR

Model Details: This is a basic science study in which all participants will participate in all task conditions within each experiment (repeated-measures design).

Study Record Dates

• First Submitted: February 24, 2025
• First Posted: February 28, 2025
• Study Start: February 6, 2025
• Primary Completion (Estimated): February 1, 2027
• Study Completion (Estimated): February 1, 2027
• Last Updated: April 22, 2026

Record last verified: 2026-04

Data Sharing

• IPD Sharing: Will share
• Shared Documents: STUDY PROTOCOL, SAP, ICF, ANALYTIC CODE
• Time Frame: Data will be available indefinitely beginning with publication of results
• Access Criteria: Raw behavioral/eyetracking data will be publicly available on the lab's Open Science Framework page (https://osf.io/ufjzl/), and analysis code will be available on GitHub (an online tool for storing and managing code; github.com/SpragueLab)

Locations

US (1)