Willed Attentional Selection of Visual Features: An EEG Study

Visual selective attention studies generally tend to apply cuing paradigms to instructively direct observers’ attention to certain locations, features or objects. However, in real situations, attention in humans often flows spontaneously without any specific instructions. Recently, a concept named “willed attention” was raised in visuospatial attention, in which participants are free to make volitional attention decisions. Several ERP components during willed attention were found, along with a perspective that ongoing alpha activity may bias the subsequent attentional choice. However, it remains unclear whether similar neural mechanisms exist in feature- or object-based willed attention. Here, we included choice cues and instruct cues in a feature-based selective attention paradigm, allowing participants to freely choose or to be instructed to attend a color for the subsequent target detection task. Pre-cue ongoing alpha oscillations, cue-evoked potentials and target-related steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) were simultaneously measured as markers of attentional processing. As expected, SSVEP responses were similarly modulated by attention between choice and instruct cue trials. Similar to the case of spatial attention, a willed-attention component (Willed Attention Component, WAC) was isolated during the cue-related choice period by comparing choice and instruct cues. However, pre-cue ongoing alpha oscillations did not predict the color choice (yellow vs blue), as indicated by the chance level decoding accuracy (50%). Overall, our results revealed both similarities and differences between spatial and feature-based willed attention, and thus extended the understanding toward the neural mechanisms of volitional attention.