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

Part of paid clinical trials in Santa Barbara, California.

Sponsor
University of California, Santa Barbara
Study ID
NCT06852521
Status
Enrolling By Invitation

Conditions

  • Attention
  • Basic Science: Visual Attention in Healthy Participants

Eligibility Criteria

Sex
ALL
Age
18 Years - 55 Years
Healthy Volunteers
Accepted

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)
  • 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)
  • 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

Study Details

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).

Key Dates

Start date
Feb 6, 2025
Status verified
Apr 2026
Primary completion
Feb 28, 2027
Completion
Feb 28, 2027

Study Design

Enrollment
240 participants (estimated)
Allocation
NA
Intervention model
SINGLE_GROUP
Primary purpose
BASIC_SCIENCE

Arms

  • Experimental: Manipulations of Relevant Locations (Expt 3.1 Pilot)
    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)

Primary Outcome Measure

Behavioral response (button press) [ Time Frame: Through study completion, an average of two weeks ]

Locations (1)

FacilityCityStateZIPSite coordinators
University of California, Santa BarbaraSanta BarbaraCalifornia93117-

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By research site
University of California, Santa Barbara· Santa Barbara, CA

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