Neural Mechanisms of Real-World Attention

Attentional selection is a central part of our every day behavior as it allows us to prioritize processing of behaviorally relevant objects and thereby to achieve our goals. Recent research using ecological stimuli has yielded important new insights regarding attentional selection under naturalistic viewing conditions that were not predicted from classical attention theories. For example, visual search for familiar object categories (e.g., animals, people, cars) in cluttered natural scenes is remarkably more efficient than search in simple artificial stimulus arrays. These results are surprising because object category exemplars are complex objects consisting of specific conjunctions of several features, are highly variable from one viewing to the next, and are embedded in cluttered scenes with often dozens of other objects that compete for attention. I will discuss a series of fMRI and TMS studies that were aimed at elucidating the functional and neural basis of attentional selection from natural scenes.