Attentional control of sensory tuning in human visual perception

Attention is known to affect the response properties of sensory neurons in visual cortex. These effects have been traditionally classified into two categories: 1) changes in the gain (overall amplitude) of the response; and 2) changes in the tuning (selectivity) of the response. We performed an extensive series of behavioral measurements using psychophysical reverse correlation to understand whether/how these neuronal changes are reflected at the level of our perceptual experience. This question has been addressed before, but by different laboratories using different attentional manipulations and stimuli/tasks that are not directly comparable, making it difficult to extract a comprehensive and coherent picture from existing literature. Our results demonstrate that the effect of attention on response gain (not necessarily associated with tuning change) is relatively aspecific: it occurred across all the conditions we tested, including attention directed to a feature orthogonal to the primary feature for the assigned task. Sensory tuning, however, was affected primarily by feature-based attention and only to a limited extent by spatially directed attention, in line with existing evidence from the electrophysiological and behavioral literature.