The Interaction of Focused Attention with Flow-field Sensitivity

Two studies were performed to determine whether a subject's response to naturalistic optical flow specifying egomotion would be affected by a concurrent attention task. In the first study subjects stood in a moving room in which various areas of the optical flow generated by room movement were visible. Subjects responded to room motion with strong compensatory sway when the entire room was visible. When the side walls of the room were completely obscured by stationary screens, leaving only the front wall visible, sway was significantly reduced, though it remained greater than in an eyes-closed control. In Exp. 2 subjects were presented with either the full room (large sway response) or the room with only the front wall visible (moderate response), each in combination with either a hard or easy verbal addition task. Preliminary results show that swaying in the fully visible room and in the room with only the front wall visible increased when combined with either the hard or easy tasks. These preliminary results suggest that at the least the pick-up of optical flow specifying egomotion is not affected by concurrent attentional activity.