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The brain does not process horizontal reflection when attending to vertical reflection, or vice versa
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Description: Previous work has found that feature attention can modulate electrophysiological responses to visual symmetry (Bertamini et al., 2020). In the current study, participants observed spatially overlapping clouds of black and white dots. They discriminated vertical symmetry from asymmetry in the target dots (e.g. black or white) and ignored the regularity of the distractor dots (e.g. white or black). We measured an EEG component called the Sustained Posterior Negativity (SPN) which known to be generated by visual symmetry. There were five conditions with different combinations of target and distractor regularity. As well as replicating previous results, we found that horizontal reflection in the distractor dots had no effect on SPN amplitude. We conclude that the visual system processes reflectional symmetry in independent orientation specific channels.