Effects of Attention and Cue Conflict Awareness on Multimodal Integration in Self-Rotation Perception
Poster Presentation

Daniel R. Berger
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Psychophysics Department

Heinrich H. Bülthoff
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Psychophysics Department

     Abstract ID Number: 125
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: March 21, 2005
     Presentation date: 06/06/2005 11:30 AM in MART Auditorium
     (View Schedule)

Abstract
We investigated how the influence of visual and body cues on the perception of yaw rotations depends on focusing attention to either cue, and on becoming aware of conflicts between the two modalities.

Participants experienced passive whole-body yaw rotations and concurrent visual rotations on a motion platform. They then had to turn back actively, while attending to either visual rotation or body rotation. During return we introduced a conflict between visual and body rotation by means of a gain factor. After each return, participants had to respond whether or not they had noticed a conflict.

We found that the weight of the visual cue on the response was significantly higher for small than for large rotations. It was also significantly higher when participants attended to the visual rotation compared to platform rotation, showing that attention has a significant influence on the weights in the integration mechanism.
Further analysis revealed that the effect of attention on the cue weights was significantly larger if participants noticed conflicts than if they did not.

We conclude that participants can use attention to bias the cue weights in self-motion perception towards the attended modality, and that this effect is increased when a conflict between the cues is noticed.