Effects of Attention on Motion Repulsion
Yuzhi Chen, Xin Meng, Nestor Matthews, and Ning Qian, Vision Research,
2005, 45:1329-1339.
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paper (PDF file).
Abstract
Motion repulsion involves interaction between two directions of
motion. Since attention is known to bias interactions among different
stimuli, we investigated the effect of attentional tasks on motion
repulsion. We used two overlapping sets of random dots moving in
different directions. When subjects had to detect a small speed-change
or luminance change for dots along one direction, the repulsive
influence from the other direction was significantly reduced compared
with the control case without attentional tasks. However, when the
speed-change could occur to either direction such that subjects had to
attend both directions to detect the change, motion repulsion was not
different from the control. A further experiment showed that
decreasing the difficulty of the atten- tional task resulted in the
disappearance of the attentional effect in the case of attention to
one direction. Finally, over a wide range of contrasts for the
unattended direction, attention reduced repulsion measured with the
attended direction. These results are con- sistent with the
physiological finding that strong attention to one direction of motion
reduces inhibitory effects from the other direction.
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