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Many everyday behaviors appear to require both the interpretation of incoming sensory information and the maintenance of a current task goal. This intuitive notion suggests that combining attentional control processes might reflect a fundamentally novel way in which attention supports complex behavior. Using an established paradigm, here we show that joint recruitment in multiple attention control systems leads to corresponding combined increases in behavior and underlying sensory processing of attended targets. Moreover, our data also revealed that the nature of the combined effect depends on a flexible allocation of attentional resources to individual component processes, which change dynamically as a function of task demands. Together, these data provide a new conceptual framework for characterizing the role of attention in behavior and suggest important extensions to the prevailing theories of attention.

Attention can be controlled either exogenously, driven by the stimulus features, or endogenously, driven by the internal expectancies about events in the environment. Extending this prevailing framework, we (Ristic and Kingstone, 2012) recently demonstrated that performance could also be independently controlled by overlearned behaviorally relevant stimuli, like arrows, producing automated effects. Using a difficult target discrimination task within a double cuing paradigm, here we tested whether automated orienting engages selective attention, and if in doing so it draws on its own pool of attentional resources. Our data unequivocally support both possibilities, and indicate that human attention networks are uniquely specialized for processing behaviorally relevant information.

Attention abilities rest on the coordinated interplay of multiple components. One consequence to this multifaceted account is that selection processes likely intersect with perception at various junctures. Drawing from this overarching view, the current research examines how different forms of visuospatial attention influence various aspects of conscious perception, including signal detection, signal discrimination, visual awareness, and metacognition. In this effort, we combined a double spatial cueing approach, where stimulus- and goal-driven orienting were concurrently engaged via separate cues, with Type I and Type II signal detection theoretic frameworks through five experiments. Consistent with the modular view of visuospatial attention, our comprehensive assessment reveals that stimulus- and goal-driven orienting operate independently of each other for increasing perceptual sensitivity and reducing the decision bound. Conversely, however, our study shows that both forms of orienting hardly influence visual awareness and metacognition once perceptual sensitivity is accounted for. Our results therefore undermine the idea that attention directly interfaces with subjective aspects of perception. Instead, our findings submit a general framework whereby these attention modules indirectly impact visual awareness and metacognition by increasing perceptual evidence and decreasing the decision bound.

Over more than two decades, studies using imaging techniques of the living human brain have begun to explore the neural correlates of hypnosis. The collective findings provide a gripping, albeit preliminary, account of the underlying neurobiological mechanisms involved in hypnotic phenomena. While substantial advances lend support to different hypotheses pertaining to hypnotic modulation of attention, control, and monitoring processes, the complex interactions among the many mediating variables largely hinder our ability to isolate robust commonalities across studies. The present account presents a critical integrative synthesis of neuroimaging studies targeting hypnosis as a function of suggestion. Specifically, hypnotic induction without task-specific suggestion is examined, as well as suggestions concerning sensation and perception, memory, and ideomotor response. The importance of carefully designed experiments is highlighted to better tease apart the neural correlates that subserve hypnotic phenomena. Moreover, converging findings intimate that hypnotic suggestions seem to induce specific neural patterns. These observations propose that suggestions may have the ability to target focal brain networks. Drawing on evidence spanning several technological modalities, neuroimaging studies of hypnosis pave the road to a more scientific understanding of a dramatic, yet largely evasive, domain of human behavior.

Most researchers leverage bottom-up suppression to unlock the underlying mechanisms of unconscious processing. However, a top-down approach – for example via hypnotic suggestion – paves the road to experimental innovation and complementary data that afford new scientific insights concerning attention and the unconscious. Drawing from a reliable taxonomy that differentiates subliminal and preconscious processing, we outline how an experimental trajectory that champions top-down suppression techniques, such as those practiced in hypnosis, is uniquely poised to further contextualize and refine our scientific understanding of unconscious processing. Examining subliminal and preconscious methods, we demonstrate how instrumental hypnosis provides a reliable adjunct that supplements contemporary approaches. Specifically, we provide an integrative synthesis of the advantages and shortcomings that accompany a top-down approach to probe the unconscious mind. Our account provides a larger framework for complementing the results from core studies involving prevailing subliminal and preconscious techniques.

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