Information that has the highest salience (a stimulus that stands out the most) or relevance to what a person is thinking about is selected for further and more complete analysis by conscious (attentive) processing.
[4] If this happens, the conscious goal becomes finding anything that stands out, which would direct the person's attention towards red distractor circles as well as the green target.
The "contingent-capture" model emphasizes the idea that a person's current intentions and/or goals affect the speed and efficiency of pre-attentive processing.
[4] This would mean that the difference in reaction time occurs at the attentive level, after pre-attentive processing and stimulus selection has already taken place.
In the visual system, the receptive fields at the back of the eye (retina) transfer the image via axons to the thalamus, specifically the lateral geniculate nuclei.
[7] Simple and complex cells in the brain process boundary and surface information by deciphering the image's contrast, orientation, and edges.
[12] The theory behind this is called the dimension-weighting account (DWA) where each time a specific stimulus (i.e. color) is presented it contributes to the weight of the stimuli.
[19] Specifically, the pre-attentive process of multisensory integration works jointly with attention to activate brain regions such as the STS.
[19] Multisensory integration seems to give a person the advantage of greater comprehension if both auditory and visual stimuli are being processed together.
[15] Professional musicians, in particular, show larger ERP (Event-related potential) responses to deviations in auditory stimuli and have possibly related structural differences in their brains (Heschl's gyrus, corpus callosum, and pyramidal tracts).
Using EEG (electroencephalography) methods in pre-attentive colour perception, a study observed how easy it was for bilinguals to adapt to the linguistic constructs of a different culture.
[14][16][21] Abnormal prefrontal cortex function in individuals with schizophrenia results in the inability to use pre-attentive processing to recognize familiar auditory stimuli as non-threatening.
[16] Individuals with schizophrenia with positive symptoms have a greater capability of pre-attentively processing emotionally negative odors.
[22] Alzheimer's disease is typically thought to affect high-level brain functioning (like memory) but can also have negative impacts on visual pre-attentive processing.
[21] Some of the difficulties with social interaction seen in autistic individuals may be due to an impairment in filtration of pre-attentive auditory information.