Abstract

We studied the effect of attention on the adaptation to radially moving pattern with use of motion aftereffect(MAE). In the first experiment, we investigate the effect of attentional distraction on adaptation to radial motion by measuring MAEs with and without the detection task for intermittently changing digits. We measured signal-to-noise ratio of a real motion signal in a random dot pattern, where nullify the directional bias induced by MAE. MAE was found to reduce when observers participated in an additional task during the adaptation. In the second experiment, we asked the observers to selectively attend to one of the two moving patterns consisting of expanding and contracting random dot patterns. Although the adapting stimulus was exactly the same in both conditions, the direction of MAEs was found to be different depending on which pattern the observer attend to. The results suggest that attention can modulate the activity of the mechanism responsible for radially moving pattern.