Illusions can induce striking differences between perception and retinal input. For instance, a static Gabor with a moving internal texture appears to be shifted in the direction of its internal motion, a shift that increases dramatically when the Gabor itself is also in motion. Here, we ask whether attention operates on the perceptual or physical location of this stimulus. To do so, we generated an attentional tracking task where participants (N = 15) had to keep track of a single target among three Gabors that rotated around a common center in the periphery. During tracking, the illusion was used to make three Gabors appear either shifted away from or toward one another while maintaining the same physical separation. Because tracking performance depends in part on target to distractor spacing, if attention selects targets from perceived positions, performance should be better when the Gabors appear further apart and worse when they appear closer together. We find that tracking performance is superior with greater perceived separation, implying that attentional tracking operates over perceived rather than physical positions.

幻觉会引起感知和视网膜输入之间的显着差异。例如，具有运动内部纹理的静态Gabor似乎在其内部运动方向上移动，当Gabor本身也在运动时，该移动会急剧增加。在这里，我们要问注意力是否在这种刺激的感知或物理位置上起作用。要做到这一点，我们产生了注意力跟踪任务，参与者（ñ= 15）必须跟踪围绕外围共同中心旋转的三个Gabor中的单个目标。在跟踪过程中，这种错觉被用于使三个Gabor看起来彼此偏离或相向偏移，同时保持相同的物理间隔。由于跟踪性能部分取决于目标与干扰物的间距，因此如果注意力从感知位置中选择目标，则Gabor距离更远时，性能应更好，而Gabor距离更近时，性能应更差。我们发现跟踪性能在感知距离更大的情况下表现更好，这意味着注意跟踪的作用范围超过感知位置而不是物理位置。