Selective Attention Affects Visual Adaptation

The visual system is endowed with two basic mechanisms. Adaptation allows us to adjust our sensitivity to match the prevailing level of stimuli, and selective attention enables us to focus our processing in order to discriminate and respond accurately in the cluttered visual environment. This work studied the influence of spatial-selective and feature-selective attention on two adaptational aftereffects following prolonged inspection of high contrast grating; the contrast threshold elevation aftereffect (CTE) and the tilt aftereffect (TAE).