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

NCT ID: NCT06852521

Last Updated: 2025-02-28

Study Results

Results pending

The study team has not published outcome measurements, participant flow, or safety data for this trial yet. Check back later for updates.

Basic Information

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Recruitment Status

ENROLLING_BY_INVITATION

Clinical Phase

NA

Total Enrollment

50 participants

Study Classification

INTERVENTIONAL

Study Start Date

2025-02-06

Study Completion Date

2026-02-28

Brief Summary

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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).

Detailed Description

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Conditions

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Basic Science: Visual Attention in Healthy Participants Attention

Study Design

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Allocation Method

NA

Intervention Model

SINGLE_GROUP

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

BASIC_SCIENCE

Blinding Strategy

NONE

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).

Study Groups

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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)

Group Type EXPERIMENTAL

Stimulus Properties: Target Location

Intervention Type 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

Intervention Type 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

Intervention Type 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

Interventions

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Stimulus Properties: Target Location

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

Intervention Type OTHER

Stimulus Properties: Distractor Presence

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)

Intervention Type OTHER

Stimulus properties: Cue Validity

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

Intervention Type OTHER

Eligibility Criteria

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Inclusion Criteria

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

Exclusion Criteria

• N/A
Minimum Eligible Age

18 Years

Maximum Eligible Age

55 Years

Eligible Sex

ALL

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Sponsors

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National Eye Institute (NEI)

NIH

Sponsor Role collaborator

University of California, Santa Barbara

OTHER

Sponsor Role lead

Responsible Party

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Responsibility Role SPONSOR

Principal Investigators

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Tommy C Sprague

Role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR

University of California, Santa Barbara

Locations

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University of California, Santa Barbara

Santa Barbara, California, United States

Site Status

Countries

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United States

References

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Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 28628004 (View on PubMed)

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.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 34354071 (View on PubMed)

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Other Identifiers

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R01EY035300

Identifier Type: NIH

Identifier Source: secondary_id

View Link

10-25-0048: 3.1 (Pilot)

Identifier Type: -

Identifier Source: org_study_id