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Poster C37 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Attention Alters the Representational Geometry of a Perceptual Feature Space
Angus Chapman1 (), Melissa Allouche1, Rachel Denison1; 1Boston University
Attention not only improves visual performance, but also alters the appearance of visual features, including contrast, spatial position, and color. We hypothesized that such effects could be accounted for by considering how attention affects the representational geometries of perceptual feature spaces. However, the effect of attention on the representational geometry of an entire perceptual feature space has not yet been characterized. Here, we conducted a psychophysical experiment to investigate how attention affects the representational geometry of orientation appearance by measuring how feature-based attention to a specific orientation changed the perceived similarities of oriented stimuli. Participants performed two interleaved tasks, consisting of an attention task requiring detection of small tilts in an array of bars in the attended orientation (±45º from vertical), followed by an independent triad orientation similarity judgment. We performed multidimensional scaling (MDS) analyses on the similarities estimated from the triad task under each attention condition, as well as when no attention task was performed. MDS revealed that a 3-dimensional solution best captured the representation of perceived orientations, and that attention increased the perceptual distances between orientations near the attended angle. This finding supports the idea that attention expands perceptual feature spaces to enhance the representation of task-relevant features.
Keywords: attention representational geometry psychophysics