Attention and sensory adaptation

Abstract

The human sensory system features many dynamic and functional mechanisms that address processing capacity limitations and the complexity of sensory information available in the world. Attention allows the sensory system to prioritise the processing of relevant inputs and ignore those that are irrelevant, while adaptation provides individual neurons a greater sensitivity to a broad range of input. Aftereffects resulting from adaptation are a useful behavioural tool for probing the underlying mechanisms of adapted features, as well as the influence of attention. This thesis features a literature review, meta-analytic review and two empirical studies to explore the influence of attention on the visual motion aftereffect (MAE) and haptic curvature aftereffect (CAE).
Chapter 1 features an introduction to adaptation and attention and a review of the literature. Chapter 2 demonstrates that attention affects the MAE, with stronger effects for translational than complex motion, and that this relationship is unaffected by adaptation duration or response bias. The meta-analysis of published research (Chapter 3) confirms these findings, revealing a substantial overall effect of attention on the MAE, predominantly driven by feature-based attention and not accounted for by response bias. Chapter 4 reveals that haptic curvature adaptation is not modulated by visual or haptic attention.
The discussion (Chapter 5) combines these findings with the previous literature to conclude that visual motion adaptation is affected by attention, whereas haptic curvature adaptation operates independently of attention.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Wendy Adams: orcid.org/0000-0002-5832-1056

ORCID for Erich Graf: orcid.org/0000-0002-3162-4233

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