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Poster Session B: Wednesday, August 13, 1:00 – 4:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Attention alters numerosity tuning in the human brain

Liangyou Zhang¹, Surya Gayet, Yuxuan Cai, Serge O. Dumoulin, Ben M. Harvey; ¹Utrecht University

Presenter: Liangyou Zhang

Many animals, including humans, can rapidly and accurately perceive numerosity, the number of objects. Although typically considered a cognitive function, recent studies proposed that numerosity perception instead relies on sensory processes. The brain contains numerosity-tuned neural populations that respond most strongly when passively viewing a preferred numerosity (e.g., six). Real-world vision, however, is target-oriented, and attention may alter numerosity processing. Just like spatial attention attracts neural responses to attended locations, we asked whether attention could alter numerosity preferences toward task-relevant (i.e., attended) numerosities. Using 7T fMRI and population receptive field (pRF) modeling, participants reported the occurrence of displays containing either numerosity two (low), numerosity six (high), or white stimuli (non-numerical). Neural preferences altered accordingly: lowest when attending to two, highest to six, and intermediate for color. These results show that numerosity tuning of neural populations not only depends on stimulus properties but also on the behavioral goals of the observer.

Topic Area: Object Recognition & Visual Attention

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