TY - JOUR
T1 - Olfaction spontaneously highlights visual saliency map
AU - Chen, Kepu
AU - Zhou, Bin
AU - Chen, Shan
AU - He, Sheng
AU - Zhou, Wen
PY - 2013/10
Y1 - 2013/10
N2 - Attention is intrinsic to our perceptual representations of sensory inputs. Best characterized in the visual domain, it is typically depicted as a spotlight moving over a saliency map that topographically encodes strengths of visual features and feedback modulations over the visual scene. By introducing smells to two well-established attentional paradigms, the dot-probe and the visual-search paradigms, we find that a smell reflexively directs attention to the congruent visual image and facilitates visual search of that image without the mediation of visual imagery. Furthermore, such effect is independent of, and can override, top-down bias. We thus propose that smell quality acts as an object feature whose presence enhances the perceptual saliency of that object, thereby guiding the spotlight of visual attention. Our discoveries provide robust empirical evidence for a multimodal saliency map that weighs not only visual but also olfactory inputs.
AB - Attention is intrinsic to our perceptual representations of sensory inputs. Best characterized in the visual domain, it is typically depicted as a spotlight moving over a saliency map that topographically encodes strengths of visual features and feedback modulations over the visual scene. By introducing smells to two well-established attentional paradigms, the dot-probe and the visual-search paradigms, we find that a smell reflexively directs attention to the congruent visual image and facilitates visual search of that image without the mediation of visual imagery. Furthermore, such effect is independent of, and can override, top-down bias. We thus propose that smell quality acts as an object feature whose presence enhances the perceptual saliency of that object, thereby guiding the spotlight of visual attention. Our discoveries provide robust empirical evidence for a multimodal saliency map that weighs not only visual but also olfactory inputs.
KW - Attention
KW - Multi-sensory integration
KW - Olfaction
KW - Saliency map
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84889684519&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84889684519&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1098/rspb.2013.1729
DO - 10.1098/rspb.2013.1729
M3 - Article
C2 - 23945694
AN - SCOPUS:84889684519
SN - 0962-8452
VL - 280
JO - Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
JF - Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
IS - 1768
M1 - 20131729
ER -