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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Neuroscientists from Tübingen and Okasaki (Japan) have uncovered a mechanism that might clarify the meaning of "attention." [sciencedaily.com] This often non-quantifiable term is supposed to describe how strongly we react to a visual stimulus. An international team of neuroscientists from the Tübingen Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN) and the Okasaki National Institute for Physiological Sciences (NIPS) now explain the mechanism of "attention," not by looking at the visual system, but into the rhythm and direction of tiny eye movements that we constantly make. Their hypotheses and experimental validations are published in two back-to-back articles recently published in Frontiers in System Neuroscience. Results from four decades of research are now cast in a very different light.

Good science is supposed to be "frugal," i.e., it ought to make use of as few assumptions and abstractions as possible. In neuroscience, the abstract concept of "attention" is a concept that is considerably less frugal than would be desirable. It is basically a black box and does not necessarily explain which processes in the brain it actually addresses -- a central question of perception research today.

For several decades, "attention" was thought to be a barely definable state of certain brain regions. In visual perception, for instance, eye movements towards a stimulus are triggered in the Superior Colliculus, a part of the midbrain. The direction of attention in the brain does not react equally to all stimuli, though: when there is a high level of "attention in the sensory system, reactions are swift and intense; neuroscientists call this state "attentional capture." A state of slow and comparatively weak reactions, on the other hand, is called "inhibition of return" (IOR). Attentional capture and IOR both follow an alternating pattern, which rides on a rhythm with approximately 10 oscillations per second.

But what causes this rhythm, and how does "attention" control it?

Attention is a juicy steak and frosty beer on a Friday. Achieves "attentional capture" every time.

Original Submission