Video walkthrough available on youtube: https://youtu.be/o2-sUVTOWWk
Theories of feature-based attention have proposed that selection can
enhance nontarget features to optimize the discriminability between targets
and distractors. In three experiments, we demonstrate that attention also
warps perception of target colors away from distractors. Participants
performed visual search for an oddball color target, followed by a 2-AFC
color similarity judgment. When foil colors were rotated 10° from the
target *away* from the distractor on a color wheel, participants reported
them as more similar to the target color than the target color itself. Our
findings suggest that attention warps feature representations, presumably
to separate features to facilitate search.
Corresponding author: Angus Chapman, E-mail: afchapman@ucsd.edu