It is known that visual performance is better on the horizontal than the vertical meridian, and in the lower than the upper region of the vertical meridian (Vertical Meridian Asymmetry, "VMA"), and that exogenous spatial attention increases the apparent contrast of a stimulus. Here we investigate whether the VMA also leads to differences in the subjective appearance of contrast between the upper and lower vertical meridian, and how the effects of exogenous spatial attention on appearance interact with the VMA. Two Gabor stimuli were presented North and South of fixation at 4 degrees eccentricity along the vertical meridian. Observers were asked to report the orientation of the Gabor that was higher in contrast. By assessing which stimulus observers perceived to be higher in contrast, we obtained psychometric functions and their concomitant points of subjective equality (PSE). These functions were measured both when a neutral cue was presented in the middle of the display and transient attention was deployed via a peripheral cue to the location of one of the stimuli. Observers were told that the cues were uninformative as to the stimulus contrast or its orientation. We report two novel findings. First, apparent contrast is higher on the lower vertical meridian than on the upper. Second, the attentional enhancement of apparent contrast is asymmetrical with both low and high contrast stimuli; the effect of exogenous spatial attention is greater on the lower than the upper vertical meridian. As in prior studies, we find no corresponding asymmetry in orientation discrimination. Signal detection-based models explain the asymmetrical appearance effects as a function of differential multiplicative gain factors for the North and South locations, and predict a similar but much smaller asymmetry for orientation discrimination.

Exogenous covert attention is an automatic, transient form of attention that can be triggered by sudden changes in the periphery. Here we test for the effects of attention on color perception. We used the methodology developed by Carrasco, Ling, and Read [Carrasco, M., Ling, S., & Read, S. (2004). Attention alters appearance. Nature Neuroscience, 7 (3) 308-313] to explore the effects of exogenous attention on appearance of saturation (Experiment 1) and of hue (Experiment 2). We also tested orientation discrimination performance for single stimuli defined by saturation or hue (Experiment 3). The results indicate that attention increases apparent saturation, but does not change apparent hue, notwithstanding the fact that it improves orientation discrimination for both saturation and hue stimuli.

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Selective attention enhances visual information processing, as measured by behavioral performance and neural activity. However, little is known about its effects on subjective experience. Here, we investigated the effect of transient (exogenous) attention on the appearance of visual motion, using a psychophysical procedure that directly measures appearance and controls for response bias. Observers viewed pairs of moving dot patterns and reported the motion direction of the more coherent pattern. Directing attention (via a peripheral precue) to a stimulus location increased its perceived coherence level and improved performance on a direction discrimination task. In a control experiment, we ruled out response bias by lengthening the time interval between the cue and the stimuli, so that the effect of transient attention could no longer be exerted. Our results are consistent with those of neurophysiological studies showing that attention modulates motion processing and provide evidence of a subjective perceptual correlate of attention, with a concomitant effect on performance.

Exogenous spatial attention can be automatically engaged by a cue presented in the visual periphery. To investigate the effects of exogenous attention, previous studies have generally used highly salient cues that reliably trigger attention. However, the cueing threshold of exogenous attention has been unexamined. We investigated whether the attentional effect varies with cue salience. We examined the magnitude of the attentional effect on apparent contrast [Carrasco, M., Ling, S., & Read, S. (2004). Attention alters appearance. Nature Neuroscience, 7(3), 308–313.] elicited by cues with negative Weber contrast between 6% and 100%. Cue contrast modulated the attentional effect, even at cue contrasts above the level at which observers can perfectly localize the cue; hence, the result is not due to an increase in cue visibility. No attentional effect is observed when the 100% contrast cue is presented after the stimuli, ruling out cue bias or sensory interaction between cues and stimuli as alternative explanations. A second experiment, using the same paradigm with high contrast motion stimuli gave similar results, providing further evidence against a sensory interaction explanation, as the stimuli and task were defined on a visual dimension independent from cue contrast. Although exogenous attention is triggered automatically and involuntarily, the attentional effect is gradual.

Illusory line motion (ILM) is the illusion that a line, preceded by a small dot (cue) near one end, is perceived to shoot out from the dot even though the line is physically presented at once. Does this illusion result from a low-level motion effect, a gradient of exogenous spatial attention, or both? Given that exogenous attention speeds visual processing unequally at isoeccentric cardinal locations (M. Carrasco, A. M. Giordano, & B. McElree, 2004), we hypothesized that the contribution of attention to ILM would follow the same pattern. We characterized psychometric functions of perceived line motion direction, for 1.5° stimuli with varying amounts of physical line motion (8 levels) at four cardinal locations. We used three cue conditions to separate the effects of attention from low-level motion—a single cue to draw focal attention to the stimulus location, a distributed cue with elements near all four possible stimulus locations, and no visual cue. Distributed and single cues generate identical effects along the horizontal meridian, but the effect of the single cue is progressively greater along the vertical meridian, more so at the top location (“North”). We conclude that the low-level motion explanation accounts for the majority of the canonical example of the ILM (line preceded by a single dot) effect used in our study.

ObjectivesTo test the retinal dopaminergic hypothesis, which posits deficient blue color perception in ADHD, resulting from hypofunctioning CNS and retinal dopamine, to which blue cones are exquisitely sensitive. Also, purported sex differences in red color perception were explored.Methods30 young adults diagnosed with ADHD and 30 healthy young adults, matched on age and gender, performed a psychophysical task to measure blue and red color saturation and contrast discrimination ability. Visual function measures, such as the Visual Activities Questionnaire (VAQ) and Farnsworth-Munsell 100 hue test (FMT), were also administered.ResultsFemales with ADHD were less accurate in discriminating blue and red color saturation relative to controls but did not differ in contrast sensitivity. Female control participants were better at discriminating red saturation than males, but no sex difference was present within the ADHD group.ConclusionPoorer discrimination of red as well as blue color saturation in the female ADHD group may be partly attributable to a hypo-dopaminergic state in the retina, given that color perception (blue-yellow and red-green) is based on input from S-cones (short wavelength cone system) early in the visual pathway. The origin of female superiority in red perception may be rooted in sex-specific functional specialization in hunter-gather societies. The absence of this sexual dimorphism for red colour perception in ADHD females warrants further investigation.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1744-9081-10-38) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The visual system can learn to use information in new ways to construct appearance. Thus, signals such as the location or translation direction of an ambiguously rotating wire frame cube, which are normally uninformative, can be learned as cues to determine the rotation direction [1]. This perceptual learning occurs when the formerly uninformative signal is statistically associated with long-trusted visual cues (such as binocular disparity) that disambiguate appearance during training. In previous demonstrations, the newly learned cue was intrinsic to the perceived object, in that the signal was conveyed by the same image elements as the object itself. Here we used extrinsic new signals and observed no learning. We correlated three new signals with long-trusted cues in the rotating cube paradigm: one crossmodal (an auditory signal) and two within modality (visual). Cue recruitment did not occur in any of these conditions, either in single sessions or in ten sessions across as many days. These results suggest that the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction is important for the perceptual system in determining whether it can learn and use new information from the environment to construct appearance. Extrinsic cues do have perceptual effects (e.g. the “bounce-pass” illusion [2] and McGurk effect [3]), so we speculate that extrinsic signals must be recruited for perception, but only if certain conditions are met. These conditions might specify the age of the observer, the strength of the long-trusted cues, or the amount of exposure to the correlation.