Finding a face in the crowd: parallel and serial neural mechanisms of visual selection

Abstract

At any given moment, our visual system is confronted with more information than it can process. Thus, attention is needed to select behaviorally relevant information in a visual scene for further processing. Behavioral studies of attention during visual search have led to the distinction between serial and parallel mechanisms of selection. To find a target object in a crowded scene, for example a “face in a crowd”, the visual system might turn on and off the neural representation of each object…