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You see what you look for: Targets and distractors in visual search can cause opposing serial dependencies.

ABSTRACT: Visual perception is, at any given moment, strongly influenced by its temporal context-what stimuli have recently been perceived and in what surroundings. We have previously shown that to-be-ignored items produce a bias upon subsequent perceptual decisions that acts in parallel with other biases induced by attended items. However, our previous investigations were confined to biases upon the perceived orientation of a visual search target, and it is unclear whether these biases influence perceptual decisions in a more general sense. Here, we test whether the biases from visual search targets and distractors affect the perceived orientation of a neutral test line, one that is neither a target nor a distractor. To do so, we asked participants to search for an oddly oriented line among distractors and report its location for a few trials and next presented a test line irrelevant to the search task. Participants were asked to report the orientation of the test line. Our results indicate that in tasks involving visual search, targets induce a positive bias upon a neutral test line if their orientations are similar, whereas distractors produce an attractive bias for similar test lines and a repulsive bias if the orientations of the test line and the average orientation of the distractors are far apart in feature space. In sum, our results show that both attentional role and proximity in feature space between previous and current stimuli determine the direction of biases in perceptual decisions.

SUBMITTER: Rafiei M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8419872 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:The intricate relationship between multisensory integration and attention has been extensively researched in the multisensory field; however, the necessity of attention for the binding of multisensory stimuli remains contested. In the current study, we investigated whether diverting attention from well-known multisensory tasks would disrupt integration and whether the complexity of the stimulus and task modulated this interaction. A secondary objective of this study was to investigate individual differences in the interaction of attention and multisensory integration. Participants completed a simple audiovisual speeded detection task and McGurk task under various perceptual load conditions: no load (multisensory task while visual distractors present), low load (multisensory task while detecting the presence of a yellow letter in the visual distractors), and high load (multisensory task while detecting the presence of a number in the visual distractors). Consistent with prior studies, we found that increased perceptual load led to decreased reports of the McGurk illusion, thus confirming the necessity of attention for the integration of speech stimuli. Although increased perceptual load led to longer response times for all stimuli in the speeded detection task, participants responded faster on multisensory trials than unisensory trials. However, the increase in multisensory response times violated the race model for no and low perceptual load conditions only. Additionally, a geometric measure of Miller's inequality showed a decrease in multisensory integration for the speeded detection task with increasing perceptual load. Surprisingly, we found diverging changes in multisensory integration with increasing load for participants who did not show integration for the no load condition: no changes in integration for the McGurk task with increasing load but increases in integration for the detection task. The results of this study indicate that attention plays a crucial role in multisensory integration for both highly complex and simple multisensory tasks and that attention may interact differently with multisensory processing in individuals who do not strongly integrate multisensory information.

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You see what you look for: Targets and distractors in visual search can cause opposing serial dependencies.

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