title: Attentional control of sensory tuning in human visual perception.
abstract: Attention is known to affect the response properties of sensory neurons in visual cortex. These effects have been traditionally classified into two categories: 1) changes in the gain (overall amplitude) of the response; and 2) changes in the tuning (selectivity) of the response. We performed an extensive series of behavioral measurements using psychophysical reverse correlation to understand whether/how these neuronal changes are reflected at the level of our perceptual experience. This question has been addressed before, but by different laboratories using different attentional manipulations and stimuli/tasks that are not directly comparable, making it difficult to extract a comprehensive and coherent picture from existing literature. Our results demonstrate that the effect of attention on response gain (not necessarily associated with tuning change) is relatively aspecific: it occurred across all the conditions we tested, including attention directed to a feature orthogonal to the primary feature for the assigned task. Sensory tuning, however, was affected primarily by feature-based attention and only to a limited extent by spatially directed attention, in line with existing evidence from the electrophysiological and behavioral literature.
authors: Institute of Medical Sciences, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, United Kingdom.
authors: Aspasia E
authors: AE
authors: Paltoglou
authors: Peter
authors: P
authors: Neri
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*