4/17/25 Lasyapriya Pidaparthi: Eye tracking reveals the efficacy of object-based attention at filtering out salient distractors
CCN Brown Bag
Lasya Pidaparthi
Graduate Student
Date: Thursday, April 17, 2025
Time: 12:10- 1:00 pm
Location: 316 Wilson Hall
Eye tracking reveals the efficacy of object-based attention at filtering out salient distractors
Visual attention allows us to focus on task-relevant information. Previous research has
shown that covert attention can modulate the perceived contrast of a stimulus to a
limited extent, subtly improving perceptual performance (Li, Hanning, & Carrasco,
2021). However, it remains unclear how this process unfolds in the presence of
overlapping distracting information. We have previously shown that object-based
attention, as assessed by eye movements, can effectively filter out the presence of an
overlapping distractor object. How then might voluntary attention be impacted as the
distractor becomes more salient? We examined this question across two experiments.
In Experiment 1, participants attended to one of two overlapping objects (face, flower)
that followed minimally correlated, pseudorandom trajectories. Their task was to detect
brief distortions on the attended object. We varied distractor salience by manipulating
stimulus contrast and assessed how well the observer's gaze followed the trajectory of
the attended target object. In Experiment 2, we increased distractor salience by adding
abrupt bursts of motion. Across both experiments, gaze-following remained remarkably
unperturbed across a range of saliency levels (even when the distractor was 5 times
stronger than the target), revealing the robustness of object-based attentional filtering.