Subcortical modulation of attention counters change blindness

Abstract

Change blindness is the failure to see large changes in a visual scene that occur simultaneously with a global visual transient. Such visual transients might be brief blanks between visual scenes or the blurs caused by rapid or saccadic eye movements between successive fixations. Shifting attention to the site of the change counters this "blindness" by improving change detection and reaction time. We developed a change blindness paradigm for visual motion and then showed that presenting an attentional cue diminished the blindness in both humans and old world monkeys. We then replaced the visual cue with weak electrical stimulation of an area in the monkey's brainstem, the superior colliculus, to see if activation at such a late stage in the eye movement control system contributes to the attentional shift that counters change blindness. With this stimulation, monkeys more easily detected changes and had shorter reaction times, both characteristics of a shift of attention.