Attentional tracking takes place over perceived rather than veridical positions

Abstract

Illusions can induce striking differences between perception and retinal input. For instance, a static Gabor with a moving internal texture appears to be shifted in the direction of its internal motion, a shift that increases dramatically when the Gabor itself is also in motion. Here, we ask whether attention operates on the perceptual or physical location of this stimulus. To do so, we generated an attentional tracking task where participants (N = 15) had to keep track of a single target among three Gabors that rotated around a common center in the periphery. During tracking, the illusion was used to make three Gabors appear either shifted away from or toward one another while maintaining the same physical separation. Because tracking performance depends in part on target to distractor spacing, if attention selects targets from perceived positions, performance should be better when the Gabors appear further apart and worse when they appear closer together. We find that tracking performance is superior with greater perceived separation, implying that attentional tracking operates over perceived rather than physical positions.

Smooth pursuit operates over perceived not physical positions of the double-drift stimulus

“…Likewise, motor actions involving hand motion, such as pointing movements and tracking with a stylus, are guided by the perceived position and not the physical position ( ‘t Hart, Henriques, & Cavanagh, 2019 ; Lisi & Cavanagh, 2017 ). Moreover, it has been shown that a number of higher order perceptual and cognitive operations, including attentional tracking ( Maechler, Cavanagh, & Tse, 2021 ), pop-out effects ( Özkan, Tse, & Cavanagh, 2020 ), and the computation of apparent motion trajectories ( Hui et al, 2020 ), are all driven by the perceptual representation of the stimulus.…”

Aftereffect of perceived motion trajectories

“… 38 , 39 Adaptation could have the same bottleneck (i.e., dependence on perceived rather than physical trajectory) as attention does, so that attention processes and working memory can only access the perceived trajectories and positions. 38 , 40 , 41 The present study suggests that hard-wired and hence adaptable units tuned to trajectory orientation are activated in an integrative processing stage prior to attention processes. Gain controls of these units through adaptation may shift the population tuning and repulsively alter the appearance of trajectory orientation, essentially in a manner similar to that proposed for motion and tilt aftereffects.…”

Attending to Moving Objects

“…It is possible that the feature binding role of attention does not affect tracking, but attention may contribute more directly to figure-ground segregation, which is fundamental to objecthood (Peterson, 2014). Maechler et al (2021) found evidence that tracking operates on perceived (illusory) object positions, which suggests that tracking operates on high-level representations. Nevertheless, attention and object creation may be interactive.…”

“…Several topics that I originally planned to cover could not be included here, due to limited space. Some of the most important are the role of retinotopic, spatiotopic, and configural representations in tracking (see (Yantis, 1992;Bill et al, 2020;Howe et al, 2010b;Meyerhoff et al, 2015;Liu et al, 2005;Maechler et al, 2021)), the role of distractor suppression, the role of surface features (Papenmeier et al, 2014), and the findings from dual-task paradigms. I hope those readers whose favorite topic was left out can take some consolation in the fact that my own favorite, the temporal limits on tracking (Holcombe and Chen, 2013;Roudaia and Faubert, 2017;Howard et al, 2011), also was not covered.…”