The effects of distractors and spatial precues on covert visual search in macaque

Covert visual search has been studied extensively in humans, and has been used as a tool for understanding visual attention and cueing effects. In contrast, much less is known about covert search performance in monkeys, despite the fact that much of our understanding of the neural mechanisms of attention is based on these animals. In this study, we characterize the covert visual search performance of monkeys by training them to discriminate the orientation of a briefly-presented, peripheral Landolt-C target embedded within an array of distractor stimuli while maintaining fixation. We found that target discrimination performance declined steeply as the number of distractors increased when the target and distractors were of the same color, but not when the target was an odd color (color pop-out). Performance was also strongly affected by peripheral spatial precues presented before target onset, with better performance seen when the precue coincided with the target location (valid precue) than when it did not (invalid precue). Moreover, the effectiveness of valid precues was greatest when the delay between precue and target was short (similar to 80-100 ms), and gradually declined with longer delays, consistent with a transient component to the cueing effect. Discrimination performance was also significantly affected by prior knowledge of the target location in the absence of explicit visual precues. These results demonstrate that covert visual search performance in macaques is very similar to that of humans, indicating that the macaque provides an appropriate model for understanding the neural mechanisms of covert search. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.