Differentiating Endogenous and Exogenous Attention Shifts Based on Fixation-Related Potentials

Abstract

Attentional shifts can occur voluntarily (endogenous control) or reflexively (exogenous control). Previous studies have shown that the neural mechanisms underlying these shifts produce different activity patterns in the brain. Changes in visual-spatial attention are usually accompanied by eye movements and a fixation on the new center of attention. In this study, we analyze the fixation-related potentials in electroencephalographic recordings of 10 participants during computer screen-based viewing tasks. During task performance, we presented salient visual distractors to evoke reflexive attention shifts. Surrounding each fixation, 0.7-second data windows were extracted and labeled as "endogenous"or "exogenous". Averaged over all participants, the balanced classification accuracy using a person-dependent Linear Discriminant Analysis reached 59.84%. In a leave-one-participant-out approach, the average classification accuracy reached 58.48%. Differentiating attention shifts, based on fixation-related potentials, could be used to deepen the understanding of human viewing behavior or as a Brain-Computer Interface for attention-aware user interface adaptations.