Attentional modulation in motion aftereffect

Abstract

We examined the effects of concurrent alphanumeric discrimination task requiring the spatial selective attention to various motion aftereffects (MAE). We found that the effects of attentional tasks on the MAEs depended on the type of MAE and on the size of the adapting stimulus. For the small adapting stimulus, the strength of the simple translation MAE was attenuated by the concurrent tasks, and the MAE in depth or rotation MAE were not. Using the large stimulus, however, the effects of attention were not observed in any of MAEs. These results suggest that the MAE was not always switched off by selective attention as suggested by Chaudhuri (1990). Our psychophysical results are consistent with the characteristics of neurons in the macaque MST reported in several physiological studies.

Motion adaptation and attention: A critical review and meta-analysis

“…the time constant). This finding is broadly consistent with Takeuchi & Kita (1994), who found that diverted attention led to reduced MAEs across adaptation durations of 20, 40 and 80 seconds.…”

“…They suggested that small vs. large (or whole field) stimuli are processed by separate motion mechanisms, with the former sensitive to object motion, and the latter sensitive to the optic flow generated by self-motion. Our analyses revealed smaller attentional effects for larger adaptation stimuli (which may be processed as optic flow), consistent with the idea that selective attention affects the processing of object, rather than self-motion (Takeuchi & Kita, 1994).…”

“…Our analyses revealed a relationship between stimulus size and the effect of attention, with a smaller effect for larger adaptation stimuli, in line with Takeuchi and Kita (1994).…”

“…adaptation is yet to emerge, however, due to null (Morgan, 2013(Morgan, , 2012(Morgan, , 2011Pavan and Greenlee, 2015), or inconsistent findings (e.g. Georgiades & Harris, 2002b;Takeuchi & Kita, 1994). One might argue that, given the importance of motion for fundamental tasks such as segmentation (including breaking camouflage), depth perception and guiding self-motion (e.g.…”

“…Previous studies have asked whether stimulus size determines the extent of attentional modulation (Georgiades and Harris, 2000b;Takeuchi and Kita, 1994). If attentional effects are larger at higher-level cortical regions (at least for complex motion) then attentional modulation of MAEs might increase with stimulus size, given increasing receptive field size from V1 to MT and MST (Smith et al, 2001).…”