Categorical Difference and Related Brain Regions of the Attentional Blink Effect

TL;DR

This study investigates how different image categories and brain regions influence the attentional blink effect by predicting AB magnitude from CNN features and fMRI data, revealing the importance of mid-level features and broader brain areas.

Contribution

It demonstrates that mid-level CNN features and larger brain regions better predict attentional blink magnitude, highlighting the categorical and neural basis of the effect.

Findings

Mid-level CNN features predict ABM more accurately.

Broader brain regions like LVC, HVC, and VC are more involved in AB.

Categorical differences in images affect AB magnitude.

Abstract

Attentional blink (AB) is a biological effect, showing that for 200 to 500ms after paying attention to one visual target, it is difficult to notice another target that appears next, and attentional blink magnitude (ABM) is a indicating parameter to measure the degree of this effect. Researchers have shown that different categories of images can access the consciousness of human mind differently, and produce different ranges of ABM values. So in this paper, we compare two different types of images, categorized as animal and object, by predicting ABM values directly from image features extracted from convolutional neural network (CNN), and indirectly from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. First, for two sets of images, we separately extract their average features from layers of Alexnet, a classic model of CNN, then input the features into a trained linear regression model to predict ABM values, and we find higher-level instead of lower-level image features determine the categorical difference in AB effect, and mid-level image features predict ABM values more correctly than low-level and high-level image features. Then we employ fMRI data from different brain regions collected when the subjects viewed 50 test images to predict ABM values, and conclude that brain regions covering relatively broader areas, like LVC, HVC and VC, perform better than other smaller brain regions, which means AB effect is more related to synthetic impact of several visual brain regions than only one particular visual regions.