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Orienting Attention in the Visual Fields: An Electrophysiological Analysis

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Book cover Cognitive Electrophysiology

Abstract

The mechanisms of attentional orienting in space and the selective processing of visual events were examined in a trial-by-trial cuing task. Subjects were cued by a left- or right-pointing arrow to orient covert attention to a lateral field location. The subjects’ task was to discriminate the features of a subsequently flashed target stimulus if at the cued location. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from the scalp in response to both the cue and the target. During the cue-target interval, two effects were observed. The first was in the latency range of 250–350 msec post cue and was manifest as a relative negativity over the parietal-temporal scalp contralateral to the direction of the cue. The second effect was observed only over the right hemisphere between 300 and 500 msec latency; the response to the left cue was more negative than the response to the right cue. The ERPs to the subsequent target stimuli showed enhancements of the sensory-evoked occipital P1 (100–140 msec) and N1 (160–200 msec) peaks when the targets appeared at the cued location. These findings suggest that in response to the attention-directing cues there are lateralized executive orienting mechanisms that enable selective sensory processing during spatial attention.

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Authors
  1. George R. Mangun
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Medizinische Hochschule Hannover, Neurologische Klinik, Konstanty-Gutschow-Straße 8, D-3000, Hannover 61, Germany

    H.-J. Heinze

  2. Medizinische Hochschule Hannover, Neurologische Klinik, D-3000, Hannover 61, Germany

    T. F. Münte

  3. Center for Neuroscience, University of California, Davis, Davis, California, 95616, USA

    George R. Mangun

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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Mangun, G.R. (1994). Orienting Attention in the Visual Fields: An Electrophysiological Analysis. In: Heinze, HJ., Münte, T.F., Mangun, G.R. (eds) Cognitive Electrophysiology. Birkhäuser, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0283-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0283-7_3

  • Publisher Name: Birkhäuser, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-6693-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-0283-7

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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