Clinical trial NCT06852521: Probing the Role of Feature Dimension Maps in Visual Cognition: Manipulations of Relevant Locations on Salience Processing? (Expt 3.1 Pilot)
Official title: Probing the Role of Feature Dimension Maps in Visual Cognition: Expt 3.1 (Pilot)
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: ENROLLING_BY_INVITATION
Phase: NA
Conditions: Basic Science: Visual Attention in Healthy Participants
Attention
Lead sponsor: University of California, Santa Barbara
Sponsor class: OTHER
Collaborators: name: National Eye Institute (NEI)
First posted: 2025-02-28
Enrollment: 50
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Maximum age (years): 55
Standard ages: ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: NA
Intervention model: SINGLE_GROUP
Intervention model description: This is a basic science study in which all participants will participate in all task conditions within each experiment (repeated-measures design).
Primary purpose: BASIC_SCIENCE

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).


Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

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

Exclusion Criteria:

• N/A

Primary outcomes:
measure: Behavioral response (button press)
timeFrame: Through study completion, an average of two weeks
measure: Gaze position
timeFrame: Through study completion, an average of two weeks
Secondary outcomes:
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Santa Barbara
country: United States
facility: University of California, Santa Barbara
state: California
Study officials:
affiliation: University of California, Santa Barbara
name: Tommy C Sprague
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References:
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citation: 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.
citation: 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.
citation: 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.
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