Cortical summation and attentional modulation of combined chromatic and luminance signals

Measuring contrast processing in the visual system using the steady state visually evoked potential (SSVEP)

Contrast is the currency of the early visual system. Measuring the way that the computations underlying contrast processing depend on factors such as spatial and temporal frequency, age, clinical conditions, eccentricity, chromaticity and the presence of other stimuli has been a focus of vision science for over a century. One of the most productive experimental approaches in this field has been the use of the 'steady-state visually-evoked potential' (SSVEP): a technique where contrast modulating inputs are 'frequency tagged' (presented at well-defined frequencies and phases) and the electrical signals that they generate in the brain are analyzed in the temporal frequency domain. SSVEPs have several advantages over conventional measures of visually-evoked responses: they have relatively unambiguous ouput measures, a high signal to noise ratio (SNR), and they allow us to analyze interactions between stimulus components using a convenient mathematical framework. Here we describe how SSVEPs have been used to study visual contrast over the past 70 years. Because our thinking about SSVEPs is well-described by simple mathematical models, we embed code that illustrates key steps in the modelling and analysis. This paper can therefore be used both as a review of the use of SSVEP in measuring human contrast processing, and as an interactive learning aid.

The consequences of color chromaticity on electrophysiological measures of attentional deployment in visual search

We investigated to what extent color vividness of visual items influences how humans prioritize information in a search task. For this, color chromaticity was manipulated over two search experiments. While recording the electroencephalogram, participants searched for a shape of certain color among three other shapes, when it emerged from a stream of flickering gray placeholders. Each location was tagged with a specific frequency evoking the steady-state-visual-evoked potential (SSVEP) allowing to track attentional deployment on multiple items. Color vividness boosted SSVEP amplitudes independent of item type, i.e., targets or distractors, while leaving other measures of attentional deployment-event-related potentials and alpha-band amplitudes-mostly unaffected. Interestingly, relative modulation of target and distractor SSVEP amplitudes was comparable between experiments suggesting similar attentional deployment. The results highlight that attentional deployment to search items depends on low-level stimulus features that need to be controlled to allow for inferences about capture or suppression of individual items.

Chromatic visual evoked potentials: A review of physiology, methods and clinical applications

Objective assessment of the visual system can be performed electrophysiologically using the visual evoked potential (VEP). In many clinical circumstances, this is performed using high contrast achromatic patterns or diffuse flash stimuli. These methods are clinically valuable but they may only assess a subset of possible physiological circuitries within the visual system, particularly those involved in achromatic (luminance) processing. The use of chromatic VEPs (cVEPs) in addition to standard VEPs can inform us of the function or dysfunction of chromatic pathways. The chromatic VEP has been well studied in human health and disease. Yet, to date our knowledge of their underlying mechanisms and applications remains limited. This likely reflects a heterogeneity in the methodology, analysis and conclusions of different works, which leads to ambiguity in their clinical use. This review sought to identify the primary methodologies employed for recording cVEPs. Furthermore cVEP maturation and application in understanding the function of the chromatic system under healthy and diseased conditions are reviewed. We first briefly describe the physiology of normal colour vision, before describing the methodologies and historical developments which have led to our understanding of cVEPs. We thereafter describe the expected maturation of the cVEP, followed by reviewing their application in several disorders: congenital colour vision deficiencies, retinal disease, glaucoma, optic nerve and neurological disorders, diabetes, amblyopia and dyslexia. We finalise the review with recommendations for testing and future directions.

Division and spreading of attention across color

Biological systems must allocate limited perceptual resources to relevant elements in their environment. This often requires simultaneous selection of multiple elements from the same feature dimension (e.g. color). To establish the determinants of divided attentional selection of color, we conducted an experiment that used multicolored displays with four overlapping random dot kinematograms that differed only in hue. We manipulated (i) requirement to focus attention to a single color or divide it between two colors; (ii) distances of distractor hues from target hues in a perceptual color space. We conducted a behavioral and an electroencephalographic experiment, in which each color was tagged by a specific flicker frequency and driving its own steady-state visual evoked potential. Behavioral and neural indices of attention showed several major consistencies. Concurrent selection halved the neural signature of target enhancement observed for single targets, consistent with an approximately equal division of limited resources between two hue-selective foci. Distractors interfered with behavioral performance in a context-dependent fashion but their effects were asymmetric, indicating that perceptual distance did not adequately capture attentional distance. These asymmetries point towards an important role of higher-level mechanisms such as categorization and grouping-by-color in determining the efficiency of attentional allocation in complex, multicolored scenes.

In primary visual cortex fMRI responses to chromatic and achromatic stimuli are interdependent and predict contrast detection thresholds

Chromatic and achromatic signals in primary visual cortex have historically been considered independent of each other but have since shown evidence of interdependence. Here, we investigated the combination of two components of a stimulus; an achromatic dynamically changing check background and a chromatic (L-M or S cone) target grating. We found that combinations of chromatic and achromatic signals in primary visual cortex were interdependent, with the dynamic range of responses to chromatic contrast decreasing as achromatic contrast increased. A contrast detection threshold study also revealed interdependence of background and target, with increasing chromatic contrast detection thresholds as achromatic background contrast increased. A model that incorporated a normalising effect of achromatic contrast on chromatic responses, but not vice versa, best predicted our V1 data as well as behavioural thresholds. Further along the visual hierarchy, the dynamic range of chromatic responses was maintained when compared to achromatic responses, which became increasingly compressive.

Early sensory gain control is dominated by obligatory and global feature-based attention in top-down shifts of combined spatial and feature-based attention

What are the dynamics of global feature-based and spatial attention, when deployed together? In an attentional shifting experiment, flanked by three control experiments, we investigated neural temporal dynamics of combined attentional shifts. For this purpose, orange- and blue-frequency-tagged spatially overlapping Random Dot Kinematograms were presented in the left and right visual hemifield to elicit continuous steady-state-visual-evoked-potentials. After being initially engaged in a fixation cross task, participants were at some point in time cued to shift attention to one of the Random Dot Kinematograms, to detect and respond to brief coherent motion events, while ignoring all such events in other Random Dot Kinematograms. The analysis of steady-state visual-evoked potentials allowed us to map time courses and dynamics of early sensory-gain modulations by attention. This revealed a time-invariant amplification of the to-be attended color both at the attended and the unattended side, followed by suppression for the to-be-ignored color at attended and unattended sides. Across all experiments, global and obligatory feature-based selection dominated early sensory gain modulations, whereas spatial attention played a minor modulatory role. However, analyses of behavior and neural markers such as alpha-band activity and event-related potentials to target- and distractor-event processing, revealed clear modulations by spatial attention.

Decoding of EEG signals reveals non-uniformities in the neural geometry of colour

The idea of colour opponency maintains that colour vision arises through the comparison of two chromatic mechanisms, red versus green and yellow versus blue. The four unique hues, red, green, blue, and yellow, are assumed to appear at the null points of these the two chromatic systems. Here we hypothesise that, if unique hues represent a tractable cortical state, they should elicit more robust activity compared to other, non-unique hues. We use a spatiotemporal decoding approach to report that electroencephalographic (EEG) responses carry robust information about the tested isoluminant unique hues within a 100-350 ms window from stimulus onset. Decoding is possible in both passive and active viewing tasks, but is compromised when concurrent high luminance contrast is added to the colour signals. For large hue-differences, the efficiency of hue decoding can be predicted by mutual distance in a nominally uniform perceptual colour space. However, for small perceptual neighbourhoods around unique hues, the encoding space shows pivotal non-uniformities which suggest that anisotropies in neurometric hue-spaces may reflect perceptual unique hues.

Recognition efficiency of atypical cardiovascular readings on ECG devices through fogged goggles

In their continuing battle against the COVID-19 pandemic, medical workers in hospitals worldwide need to wear safety glasses and goggles to protect their eyes from the possible transmission of the virus. However, they work for long hours and need to wear a mask and other personal protective equipment, which causes their protective eye wear to fog up. This fogging up of eye wear, in turn, has a substantial impact in the speed and accuracy of reading information on the interface of electrocardiogram (ECG) machines. To gain a better understanding of the extent of the impact, this study experimentally simulates the fogging of protective goggles when viewing the interface with three variables: the degree of fogging of the goggles, brightness of the screen, and color of the font of the cardiovascular readings. This experimental study on the target recognition of digital font is carried out by simulating the interface of an ECG machine and readability of the ECG machine with fogged eye wear. The experimental results indicate that the fogging of the lenses has a significant impact on the recognition speed and the degree of fogging has a significant correlation with the font color and brightness of the screen. With a reduction in screen brightness, its influence on recognition speed shows a v-shaped trend, and the response time is the shortest when the screen brightness is 150 cd/m2. When eyewear is fogged, yellow and green font colors allow a quicker response with a higher accuracy. On the whole, the subjects show a better performance with the use of green font, but there are inconsistencies. In terms of the interaction among the three variables, the same results are also found and the same conclusion can be made accordingly. This research study can act as a reference for the interface design of medical equipment in events where medical staff wear protective eyewear for a long period of time.

Temporal dynamics of the neural representation of hue and luminance polarity

Hue and luminance contrast are basic visual features. Here we use multivariate analyses of magnetoencephalography data to investigate the timing of the neural computations that extract them, and whether they depend on common neural circuits. We show that hue and luminance-contrast polarity can be decoded from MEG data and, with lower accuracy, both features can be decoded across changes in the other feature. These results are consistent with the existence of both common and separable neural mechanisms. The decoding time course is earlier and more temporally precise for luminance polarity than hue, a result that does not depend on task, suggesting that luminance contrast is an updating signal that separates visual events. Meanwhile, cross-temporal generalization is slightly greater for representations of hue compared to luminance polarity, providing a neural correlate of the preeminence of hue in perceptual grouping and memory. Finally, decoding of luminance polarity varies depending on the hues used to obtain training and testing data. The pattern of results is consistent with observations that luminance contrast is mediated by both L-M and S cone sub-cortical mechanisms.

Electrophysiological evidence for higher-level chromatic mechanisms in humans

Color vision in humans starts with three types of cones (short [S], medium [M], and long [L] wavelengths) in the retina and three retinal and subcortical cardinal mechanisms, which linearly combine cone signals into the luminance channel (L + M), the red-green channel (L - M), and the yellow-blue channel (S-(L + M)). Chromatic mechanisms at the cortical level, however, are less well characterized. The present study investigated such higher-order chromatic mechanisms by recording electroencephalograms (EEGs) on human observers in a noise masking paradigm. Observers viewed colored stimuli that consisted of a target embedded in noise. Color directions of the target and noise varied independently and systematically in an isoluminant plane of color space. The target was flickering on-off at 3 Hz, eliciting steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) responses. As a result, the masking strength could be estimated from the SSVEP amplitude in the presence of 6 Hz noise. Masking was strongest (i.e. target eliciting smallest SSVEPs) when the target and noise were along the same color direction, and was weakest (i.e. target eliciting highest SSVEPs) when the target and noise were along orthogonal directions. This pattern of results was observed both when the target color varied along the cardinal and intermediate directions, which is evidence for higher-order chromatic mechanisms tuned to intermediate axes. The SSVEP result can be well predicted by a model with multiple broadly tuned chromatic mechanisms. In contrast, a model with only cardinal mechanisms failed to account for the data. These results provide strong electrophysiological evidence for multiple chromatic mechanisms in the early visual cortex of humans.

Steady-State Visually Evoked Potentials and Feature-based Attention: Preregistered Null Results and a Focused Review of Methodological Considerations

Feature-based attention is the ability to selectively attend to a particular feature (e.g., attend to red but not green items while looking for the ketchup bottle in your refrigerator), and steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEPs) measured from the human EEG signal have been used to track the neural deployment of feature-based attention. Although many published studies suggest that we can use trial-by-trial cues to enhance relevant feature information (i.e., greater SSVEP response to the cued color), there is ongoing debate about whether participants may likewise use trial-by-trial cues to voluntarily ignore a particular feature. Here, we report the results of a preregistered study in which participants either were cued to attend or to ignore a color. Counter to prior work, we found no attention-related modulation of the SSVEP response in either cue condition. However, positive control analyses revealed that participants paid some degree of attention to the cued color (i.e., we observed a greater P300 component to targets in the attended vs. the unattended color). In light of these unexpected null results, we conducted a focused review of methodological considerations for studies of feature-based attention using SSVEPs. In the review, we quantify potentially important stimulus parameters that have been used in the past (e.g., stimulation frequency, trial counts) and we discuss the potential importance of these and other task factors (e.g., feature-based priming) for SSVEP studies.

Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials Elicited from Early Visual Cortex Reflect Both Perceptual Color Space and Cone-Opponent Mechanisms

Colors are represented in the cone-opponent signals, L-M versus S cones, at least up to the level of inputs to the primary visual cortex. We explored the hue selective responses in early cortical visual areas through recordings of steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs), elicited by a flickering checkerboard whose color smoothly swept around the hue circle defined in a cone-opponent color space. If cone opponency dominates hue representation in the source of SSVEP signals, SSVEP amplitudes as a function of hue should form a profile that is line-symmetric along the cardinal axes of the cone-opponent color space. Observed SSVEP responses were clearly chromatic ones with increased SSVEP amplitudes and reduced response latencies for higher contrast conditions. The overall elliptic amplitude profile was significantly tilted away from the cardinal axes to have the highest amplitudes in the "lime-magenta" direction, indicating that the hue representation in question is not dominated by cone-opponency. The observed SSVEP amplitude hue profile was better described as a summation of a perceptual response and cone-opponent responses with a larger weight to the former. These results indicate that hue representations in the early visual cortex, measured by the SSVEP technique, are possibly related to perceptual color contrast.

Neural differences between chromatic- and luminance-driven attentional salience in visual search

Previous electroencephalographic research on attentional salience did not fully capture the complexities of low-level vision, which relies on both cone-opponent chromatic and cone-additive luminance mechanisms. We systematically varied color and luminance contrast using a visual search task for a higher contrast target to assess the degree to which the salience-computing attentional mechanisms are constrained by low-level visual inputs. In our first experiment, stimuli were defined by contrast that isolated chromatic or luminance mechanisms. In our second experiment, targets were defined by contrasts that isolated or combined achromatic and chromatic mechanisms. In both experiments, event-related potential waveforms contralateral and ipsilateral to the target were qualitatively different for chromatic- compared to luminance-defined stimuli. The same was true of the difference waves computed from these waveforms, with isoluminant stimuli eliciting a mid-latency posterior contralateral negativity (PCN) component and achromatic stimuli eliciting a complex of multiple components, including an early posterior contralateral positivity followed by a late-latency PCN. Combining color with luminance resulted in waveform and difference wave patterns equivalent to those of achromatic stimuli. When large levels of chromaticity contrast were added to targets with small levels of luminance contrast, PCN latency was speeded. In conclusion, the mechanisms underlying attentional salience are constrained by the low-level inputs they receive. Furthermore, speeded PCN latencies for stimuli that combine color and luminance signals compared to stimuli that contain luminance alone demonstrate that color and luminance channels are integrated during pre-attentive visual processing, before top-down allocation of attention is triggered.

Stimulus-Driven Brain Rhythms within the Alpha Band: The Attentional-Modulation Conundrum

Two largely independent research lines use rhythmic sensory stimulation to study visual processing. Despite the use of strikingly similar experimental paradigms, they differ crucially in their notion of the stimulus-driven periodic brain responses: one regards them mostly as synchronized (entrained) intrinsic brain rhythms; the other assumes they are predominantly evoked responses [classically termed steady-state responses (SSRs)] that add to the ongoing brain activity. This conceptual difference can produce contradictory predictions about, and interpretations of, experimental outcomes. The effect of spatial attention on brain rhythms in the alpha band (8-13 Hz) is one such instance: alpha-range SSRs have typically been found to increase in power when participants focus their spatial attention on laterally presented stimuli, in line with a gain control of the visual evoked response. In nearly identical experiments, retinotopic decreases in entrained alpha-band power have been reported, in line with the inhibitory function of intrinsic alpha. Here we reconcile these contradictory findings by showing that they result from a small but far-reaching difference between two common approaches to EEG spectral decomposition. In a new analysis of previously published human EEG data, recorded during bilateral rhythmic visual stimulation, we find the typical SSR gain effect when emphasizing stimulus-locked neural activity and the typical retinotopic alpha suppression when focusing on ongoing rhythms. These opposite but parallel effects suggest that spatial attention may bias the neural processing of dynamic visual stimulation via two complementary neural mechanisms.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Attending to a visual stimulus strengthens its representation in visual cortex and leads to a retinotopic suppression of spontaneous alpha rhythms. To further investigate this process, researchers often attempt to phase lock, or entrain, alpha through rhythmic visual stimulation under the assumption that this entrained alpha retains the characteristics of spontaneous alpha. Instead, we show that the part of the brain response that is phase locked to the visual stimulation increased with attention (as do steady-state evoked potentials), while the typical suppression was only present in non-stimulus-locked alpha activity. The opposite signs of these effects suggest that attentional modulation of dynamic visual stimulation relies on two parallel cortical mechanisms-retinotopic alpha suppression and increased temporal tracking.