Probing the Role of Feature Dimension Maps in Visual Cognition: Manipulations of Relevant Locations on Salience Processing? (Expt 3.1 Pilot)

April 17, 2026 updated by: University of California, Santa Barbara

Probing the Role of Feature Dimension Maps in Visual Cognition: Expt 3.1 (Pilot)

How do we know what's important to look at in the environment? Sometimes, we need to look at objects because they are 'salient' (for example, bright flashing lights of a police car, or the stripes of a venomous animal), while other times, we need to ignore irrelevant salient locations and focus only on locations we know to be 'relevant'. These behaviors are often explained by the use of 'priority maps' which index the relative importance of different locations in the visual environment based on both their salience and relevance. In this research, we aim to understand how these factors interact when determining what's important to look at. Specifically, we are evaluating the extent to which the visual system considers locations that are known to be irrelevant when considering the salience of objects. We're testing the hypothesis that the visual system always computes maps of salient locations within 'feature maps', but that activity from these maps is not read out to guide behavior for task-irrelevant locations. We'll have people look at displays containing colored shapes and/or moving dots and report aspects of the visual stimulus (e.g., orientation of a line within a particular stimulus). We'll measure response times across conditions in which we manipulate the presence/absence of salient distracting stimuli and provide various kinds of cues about the potential relevance of different locations on the screen.

The rationale is that by measuring changes in visual search behavior (and thus inferring computations performed on brain representations), we will determine how these aspects of simplified visual environments impact the brain's representation of important object locations. This will support future studies using brain imaging techniques aimed at identifying the neural mechanisms supporting the extraction of salient and relevant locations from visual scenes, which can inform future diagnosis/treatment of disorders which can impact our ability to perform visual search (e.g., schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease).

Study Overview

Status

Enrolling by invitation

Conditions

Intervention / Treatment

Study Type

Interventional

Enrollment (Estimated)

240

Phase

  • Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

This section provides the contact details for those conducting the study, and information on where this study is being conducted.

Study Locations

  • United States
    • California
      • Santa Barbara, California, United States, 93117
        • University of California, Santa Barbara

Participation Criteria

Researchers look for people who fit a certain description, called eligibility criteria. Some examples of these criteria are a person's general health condition or prior treatments.

Eligibility Criteria

Ages Eligible for Study

  • Adult

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

  • between 18 and 55 years of age
  • normal or corrected-to-normal vision

Exclusion Criteria:

• N/A

Study Plan

This section provides details of the study plan, including how the study is designed and what the study is measuring.

How is the study designed?

Design Details

  • Primary Purpose: Basic Science
  • Allocation: N/A
  • Interventional Model: Single Group Assignment
  • Masking: None (Open Label)

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm
Intervention / Treatment
Experimental: Manipulations of Relevant Locations (Expt 3.1 Pilot)
Participants will complete a visual search task in which they will covertly search for a unique target item based on a specific feature dimension indicated at the start of the experiment (unique color, unique motion direction, unique shape) in an 8 item array. At the beginning of each trial, participants will be visually cued (e.g., an arrowhead around fixation) to the side of the display the target item will appear (left, right, up, down). A proportion of all trials will contain a task-irrelevant, singleton distractor defined in a non-target dimension (e.g., color target and motion distractor)
Other: Stimulus Properties: Target Location
The location of the target item in the display will be varied across trials (appear left, right, up, or down)
Other: Stimulus Properties: Distractor Presence
A proportion of all trials will contain a task-irrelevant, singleton distractor defined in a non-target dimension (e.g., color target and motion distractor)
Other: Stimulus properties: Cue Validity
Varied across trials, the validity of the cue will be determined by the match or mismatch between direction of the visual cue (an arrowhead around the fixation pointing to the right, left, up, or down) and actual target location

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Behavioral response (button press)
Time Frame: Through study completion, an average of two weeks
Participants will be required to report the orientation of a line (horizontal or vertical) within the target via a speeded button press. The specific values of color, shape, and motion will vary randomly from trial to trial. Participants will complete separate sessions with each session directing participants to search for a different target feature dimension.
Through study completion, an average of two weeks
Gaze position
Time Frame: Through study completion, an average of two weeks
The investigators will use the measured gaze position in (x,y) coordinates to verify stable fixation throughout the experiment. The data will be used to establish gaze fixation and/or track where participants look as they perform the visual search task. Trials with poor fixation performance may be excluded from further analyses.
Through study completion, an average of two weeks

Collaborators and Investigators

This is where you will find people and organizations involved with this study.

Sponsor

University of California, Santa Barbara

Collaborators

National Eye Institute (NEI)

Investigators

  • Principal Investigator: Tommy C Sprague, University of California, Santa Barbara

Publications and helpful links

The person responsible for entering information about the study voluntarily provides these publications. These may be about anything related to the study.

General Publications

Study record dates

These dates track the progress of study record and summary results submissions to ClinicalTrials.gov. Study records and reported results are reviewed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to make sure they meet specific quality control standards before being posted on the public website.

Study Major Dates

Study Start (Actual)

February 6, 2025

Primary Completion (Estimated)

February 1, 2027

Study Completion (Estimated)

February 1, 2027

Study Registration Dates

First Submitted

February 24, 2025

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

February 24, 2025

First Posted (Actual)

February 28, 2025

Study Record Updates

Last Update Posted (Actual)

April 22, 2026

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

April 17, 2026

Last Verified

April 1, 2026

More Information

Terms related to this study

Other Study ID Numbers

  • 10-25-0048: 3.1 (Pilot)
  • R01EY035300 (U.S. NIH Grant/Contract)

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?

YES

IPD Plan Description

Raw and fully anonymized behavioral data will be shared with researchers immediately upon publication

IPD Sharing Time Frame

Data will be available indefinitely beginning with publication of results

IPD Sharing Access Criteria

Raw behavioral/eyetracking data will be publicly available on the lab's Open Science Framework page (https://osf.io/ufjzl/), and analysis code will be available on GitHub (an online tool for storing and managing code; github.com/SpragueLab)

IPD Sharing Supporting Information Type

  • STUDY_PROTOCOL
  • SAP
  • ICF
  • ANALYTIC_CODE

Drug and device information, study documents

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product

No

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product

No

This information was retrieved directly from the website clinicaltrials.gov without any changes. If you have any requests to change, remove or update your study details, please contact register@clinicaltrials.gov. As soon as a change is implemented on clinicaltrials.gov, this will be updated automatically on our website as well.

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