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Measuring Attention and Visual Processing Speed by Model-based Analysis of Temporal-order Judgments
Published on: January 23, 2017
Attentional control of spatial scale: effects on self-organized motion patterns
H S Hock1, G W Balz, W Smollon
1Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton 33431, USA. hockhs@fau.edu
Vision Research
|January 20, 1999
Summary
Attentional spread influences visual perception by altering spatial scale. Broadened attention enhances global structure sensitivity and affects motion pattern formation, impacting spatial resolution.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Visual Perception
- Computational Neuroscience
Background:
- Previous research indicates broadly spread attention increases sensitivity to large spatial filters, reducing resolution but enhancing global structure perception.
- Attentional spread is controllable by the perceiver and can extend beyond a single spatial axis.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how attentional spread affects the self-organization of motion patterns in directionally ambiguous visual stimuli.
- To determine if different spatial scales, modulated by attention, lead to qualitatively different motion perceptions.
Main Methods:
- Subjects' attentional states were manipulated to be either narrowly focused or broadly spread.
- Directionally ambiguous, counterphase stimuli (rows of lines/dots) were presented.
- The resulting motion patterns (unidirectional vs. oscillatory) were analyzed in relation to attentional spread and spatial scale.
Main Results:
- Attentional spread was shown to influence the self-organization of motion patterns, leading to distinct outcomes (unidirectional vs. oscillatory) for the same stimulus.
- Qualitatively different motion patterns emerged at different spatial scales, controlled by the degree of attentional spread.
- The findings align with previous observations on attentional spread's effects on spatial resolution.
Conclusions:
- Attentional spread is a critical factor in visual perception, modulating not only spatial resolution but also the emergence of motion patterns.
- A neural model with large, co-operatively interacting receptive fields can account for both spatial resolution and motion perception effects of attentional spread.
