• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.399-415
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• 2007

Many objects are always present in a visual scene. Since the visual system has limited capacity to process multiple stimuli at a time, how to cope with this informational overload is one of the important problems to solve in visual perception. This study investigated the suppressive interactions among multiple stimuli when attention was directed to either one of the stimuli or all of them. The results indicate that suppressive interactions among multiple circles were reduced in V4 when subjects paid attention to one of the four locations, as compared to the unattended condition. However, suppressive interactions were not reduced when they paid attention to all four items as a set, in order to compute their mean size. These results suggest that whereas focused attention serves to later out irrelevant information, distributed attention provides an average representation of multiple stimuli.