Abstract
Spatial attention is generally believed to increase contrast appearance of visual stimuli. A recent study, however, revealed that attention attenuates appearance of high-contrast stimuli. This puzzling attentional attenuation was ascribed to the attentional modulation on supersaturating neurons, whose response initially increases to peak and then decreases as stimulus intensity increases. Here, in two experiments (N = 22), we examined this hypothesis by testing how contrast adaptation affects attentional modulation on contrast appearance of high-contrast stimuli. We found that luminance-contrast adaptation reversed attentional effects from attenuation to enhancement, supporting the supersaturation model. Moreover, equiluminant red-green adaptation only vanished but could not reverse the attentional attenuation, implying that the parvocellular pathway was not the dominant pathway mediating the attentional attenuation. Our study indicates that supersaturation, as a pervasive phenomenon in neuronal responses, can be manifested in attentional modulation on perceived contrast, and the M-pathway may play an important role in this attentional processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
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