Effects of selective attention on the C1 ERP component: A systematic review and meta‐analysis

The C1 event-related potential (ERP) captures the earliest stage of feedforward processing in the primary visual cortex (V1). An ongoing debate is whether top-down selective attention can modulate the C1. One side of the debate pointed out that null findings appear to outnumber positive findings; thus, selective attention does not seem to influence the C1. However, this suggestion is not based on a valid approach to summarizing evidence across studies. Therefore, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis investigating the effects of selective attention on the C1, involving 47 experiments and 794 subjects in total. Despite heterogeneity across studies, results suggested that attention has a moderate effect on the C1 (Cohen's dz = 0.33, p < .0001); that is, C1 amplitude is larger for visual stimuli that are attended than unattended. These results suggest that C1 is affected by top-down selective attention.