ISSN : 1226-9654
Two experiments were performed to examine attentional suppression in transparently moving dot fields. One of the dot groups were moving coherently in a single direction (effector) and the other were moving randomly (contender). A proportion of the random dot group occasionally moved coherently in the orthogonal direction to the effector during motion adaptation period. In ‘passive’ condition, observers viewed the stimulus without performing any task. In ‘attentive’ condition, they were asked to attend to the occasional coherent motion in the contender by reporting the motion direction. The motion aftereffect for the effector was significantly reduced in the attentive condition compared to that in passive condition. This reduction was present even when the proportion of coherent dots in the contender was zero. The similar results were observed when the occasional coherent motion in the contender was 30 deg apart from the effector, which is well within the range of motion integration. These results show that attention to one component of bivectorial motion results in strong suppression of the unattended component as well as enhancement of the attended one. Such suppression in the small angle difference implies that attention to one of the superimposed motion components encourages segregation between different directions rather than integration.
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