title: Attention alters feature space in motion processing.
abstract: Attending to a particular feature modulates the activity of neurons throughout the visual field with the result that relevant features are enhanced while irrelevant features are suppressed. Do these modulatory influences merely lead to a gating of relevant features, or does attention have a direct impact on the representation of feature space, leading to a different percept depending on the content of attention? We observed that direction estimates of the static motion aftereffect drastically change when human observers attend to a stimulus whose motion direction differs from the one of the adaptor. This observation suggests that feature-based attention might operate by local magnifications of feature space between relevant and irrelevant features.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Institute II, Westfälische Wilhelms-University, 48149 Münster, Germany. mzirnsak@stanford.edu
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zirnsak
authors.forename: Fred H
authors.initials: FH
authors.lastname: Hamker
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D015350:Contrast Sensitivity / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011601:Psychophysics; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*