The Effect Of Attention Orienting On Stereopsis And Its Neural Mechanism

The effect of attention orienting on stereopsis and the mechanism of attentional distribution in 3-D space have been studied intensively in cognitive psychology. Employing a behavioral paradigm combined with the ERP technique, the present research is aimed at exploring how different kinds of attention orienting influenced depth processing and how they were expressed in ERP components. 3 experiments were conducted to find out the temporal properties of post-attention stereopsis and their corresponding neural mechanism. Main conclusions of the paper are as follows:(1) At the short SOA, the uninformative peripheral cue produced a facilitative effect on thesubsequent discrimination task in both the 3-D and the 2-D condition. The peripheral cue elicited the automatic orientation of attention in the 3-D condition, and it took time to shift attention from one depth plane to another. The classic attention cueing effect provoked by the peripheral cue in stereoscopic space affected P1, N1 and N2 wave of ERP early components; The cross-depth cueing effect might be explained by Nl enhancement.(2) At the long SOA, the uninformative peripheral cue elicited the classic inhibition of return(IOR) in the 2-D condition; Furthermore, the IOR effect spread across different depth planes in the 3-D condition. The classic IOR in stereoscopic space affected P1, N1 and P2 wave of ERP early components. As for the cross-depth IOR, the cued target decreased the amplitude of P1 and P2 wave of ERP.(3) At both the short and the long SOA, the predictive central symbolic cue produced a facilitative effect on the subsequent discrimination task in the 3-D condition, and the difference between the two treatments was not statistically significant. At the short SOA, both the classic and the cross-depth facilitative effect in stereoscopic space affected N1 wave of ERP early components, in which the valid-cue trials induced a larger N1 amplitude; while at the long SOA, the invalid-cue trials tended to induce a larger Nl amplitude.