The human pulvinar and stimulus-driven attentional control.

The present study compared the behavioral effects of sudden motion onsets or color changes (i.e., featural changes) with the effects of new objects (i.e., multiple changes). Experiments 1 and 2 showed that lesions of the pulvinar affect stimulus-driven attentional control only when it is triggered by featural changes, but not by new objects. Experiment 3 revealed that when appended on a new object, a featural change is processed as a part of a more massive new object: Its attentional effects are larger and remain undisturbed by lesions of the pulvinar. In Experiment 4 a temporal superiority effect was found for featural changes, but not for new objects in healthy subjects. These results suggest that featural changes and new objects may be processed through different pathways and that the pulvinar may be particularly involved in stimulus-driven attentional control by sudden events entailing featural changes.