Abstract
The ability to perceive changes in motion, such as rapid changes of speed, has important ecological significance. We show that exogenous and endogenous attention have different effects on speed-change perception and operate differently in different regions of the visual field. Using a spatial-cueing paradigm, with either exogenous or endogenous cues followed by drifting Gabor patches of changing speed that appear at the cued or uncued location, we measured participants’ thresholds for localizing both acceleration and deceleration of the Gabor patches in different regions (5° and 10°) of the visual field. The results revealed a larger exogenous cueing effect, indexed by a lower threshold for the cued relative to the uncued conditions, at 5° for perceiving acceleration and at 10° for perceiving deceleration. Endogenous attention, in contrast, improved performance equally at both eccentricities. We conclude that exogenous and endogenous spatial orienting constitute two independent attentional systems, with distinct modulation patterns on speed change perception in the visual field. While exogenous attentional modulation is eccentricity-dependent, endogenous attention acts homogeneously in perifoveal and near-peripheral regions of the visual field.
Highlights
The role of covert spatial attention has been well examined in a variety of visual tasks
In the experiments presented here, we examined the possible attentional modulation of both exogenous and endogenous attention in a speed-change detection task where targets were presented in different regions of the visual field
The results of the present study revealed that participants performed better in detecting and making decisions about the speed change when the target appeared in cued rather than uncued locations with the exception of exogenous attention for deceleration in the perifoveal region
Summary
The role of covert spatial attention (i.e., the focusing of attention on a peripheral location without change in gaze) has been well examined in a variety of visual tasks. Besides effects of attention on static stimulus properties, there is evidence that spatial attention plays a role in the perception of aspects of visual motion, such as motion coherence and the speed or the size of moving stimuli [6,7,8]. These studies have mainly focused on how we perceive constant motion, motion change, i.e., acceleration and deceleration, has not yet been studied in detail.
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