Temporal attention affects contrast response function by response gain

Abstract

Orienting attention to a specific point in time has been shown to improve the contrast sensitivity at the attended time point and impair it earlier or later. This phenomenon could be explained by temporal attention increasing the effective contrast of the target presented at the attended time point which leads to changes in contrast psychometric function by contrast gain. Another explanation is that temporal attention multiplicatively amplifies the amplitude of behavioral or neural response to contrast, resulting in alterations in contrast psychometric function by response gain. To explore the underlying mechanism, we adopted a temporal cueing orientation discrimination task using audio pre-cues composed of different frequency components to induce different attentional allocations in the time domain and targets of various contrast intensities to measure contrast psychometric functions. Obtained psychometric functions for contrast sensitivity were fitted for different conditions with discrepant attentional states in time. We found that temporal attention manipulated by cue affected contrast psychometric function by response gain, indicating that multiplying the contrast response of the visual target occurring at the selected point in time by a fixed factor is a crucial way for temporal attention to modulate perceptual processing.