Stochastic resonance in attention control

¹ Laboratory for Dynamics of Emergent Intelligence, RIKEN Brain Science Institute 2-1 Hirosawa, Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan
² Educational Physiology Laboratory, Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-0033, Japan
³ Psychophysics and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Psychology The University of British Columbia - 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada

Received: 24 July 2006
Accepted: 18 October 2006

Abstract

We investigated the beneficial role of noise in a human higher brain function, namely visual attention control. We asked subjects to detect a weak gray-level target inside a marker box either in the left or the right visual field. Signal detection performance was optimized by presenting a low level of randomly flickering gray-level noise between and outside the two possible target locations. Further, we found that an increase in eye movement (saccade) rate helped to compensate for the usual deterioration in detection performance at higher noise levels. To our knowledge, this is the first experimental evidence that noise can optimize a higher brain function which involves distinct brain regions above the level of primary sensory systems —switching behavior between multi-stable attention states— via the mechanism of stochastic resonance.