The Phenomenology of Attention

Prinzmetal, William; Nwachuku, Ijeoma; Bodanski, Laura; Blumenfeld, Laura D.; Shimizu, Naomi

doi:10.1006/ccog.1997.0313

Cited by 72 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…As a result, it is possible that both backgrounds and targets can change in perceptual salience even if there is no corresponding change in their appearance, and thus that adaptation may modulate functionally distinct neural signals. This is also in accord with the findings that attention can have profound changes on visual salience without producing correspondingly large changes in visual appearance (Blaser, Sperling, & Lu, 1999; Carrasco, Ling, & Read, 2004; Prinzmetal, Nwachuku, Bodanski, Blumenfeld, & Shimizu, 1997), and that it might change the adaptation gain in neurons separately from the contrast gain (Rezec et al, 2004). This dissociation could allow adaptation to fulfill the potentially conflicting demands of regulating both appearance and salience—so that how “noteworthy” a stimulus appears could vary without a corresponding change in what it “looks” like.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Adaptation and visual salience

et al. 2010

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We examined how the salience of color is affected by adaptation to different color distributions. Observers searched for a color target on a dense background of distractors varying along different directions in color space. Prior adaptation to the backgrounds enhanced search on the same background while adaptation to orthogonal background directions slowed detection. Advantages of adaptation were seen for both contrast adaptation (to different color axes) and chromatic adaptation (to different mean chromaticities). Control experiments, including analyses of eye movements during the search, suggest that these aftereffects are unlikely to reflect simple learning or changes in search strategies on familiar backgrounds, and instead result from how adaptation alters the relative salience of the target and background colors. Comparable effects were observed along different axes in the chromatic plane or for axes defined by different combinations of luminance and chromatic contrast, consistent with visual search and adaptation mediated by multiple color mechanisms. Similar effects also occurred for color distributions characteristic of natural environments with strongly selective color gamuts. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that adaptation may play an important functional role in highlighting the salience of novel stimuli by discounting ambient properties of the visual environment.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Adaptation and visual salience

et al. 2010

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“…This effect of uncertainty on performance was not small, but rather an almost two-fold modulation of sensitivity for discrimination of a single motion signal. Such effects of stimulus uncertainty are well-documented (Cohn and Lasley, 1974; Lasley and Cohn, 1981; Pelli, 1985; Shiu and Pashler, 1994; Luck et al, 1996; Prinzmetal et al, 1997; Luck and Thomas, 1999; Gould et al, 2007). Hence, small differences in levels of uncertainty between the two studies could lead to considerable changes in estimates of summation magnitude.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Summation of Visual Motion across Eye Movements Reflects a Nonspatial Decision Mechanism

Morris

Liu

Cropper

et al. 2010

Journal of Neuroscience

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Human vision remains perceptually stable even though retinal inputs change rapidly with each eye movement. Although the neural basis of visual stability remains unknown, a recent psychophysical study pointed to the existence of visual feature-representations anchored in environmental rather than retinal coordinates (e.g., "spatiotopic" receptive fields; Melcher and Morrone, 2003). In that study, sensitivity to a moving stimulus presented after a saccadic eye movement was enhanced when preceded by another moving stimulus at the same spatial location before the saccade. The finding is consistent with spatiotopic sensory integration, but it could also have arisen from a probabilistic improvement in performance due to the presence of more than one motion signal for the perceptual decision. Here we show that this statistical advantage accounts completely for summation effects in this task. We first demonstrate that measurements of summation are confounded by noise related to an observer's uncertainty about motion onset times. When this uncertainty is minimized, comparable summation is observed regardless of whether two motion signals occupy the same or different locations in space, and whether they contain the same or opposite directions of motion. These results are incompatible with the tuning properties of motionsensitive sensory neurons and provide no evidence for a spatiotopic representation of visual motion. Instead, summation in this context reflects a decision mechanism that uses abstract representations of sensory events to optimize choice behavior.

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“…However, this shift in visibility when orienting to a visual stimulus apparently does not occur, at least for stimuli that are sufficiently bright to be conscious. In an extensive series of experiments Prinzmetal et al (1997) have shown that being able to pay attention to a stimulus or directing attention to a stimulus location reduces the variability of judgments about luminance or other stimulus dimensions but does not produce a subjective brightening of the stimulus. This suggests an important dissociation between luminance increases and attention on subjective experience even when they influence the same component of the scalp recorded ERP.…”

Section: Sensory Awarenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attentional Networks and Consciousness

Posner¹

2012

Front. Psychology

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The term consciousness is an important one in the vernacular of the western literature in many fields. It is no wonder that scientists have assumed that consciousness will be found as a component of the human brain and that we will come to understand its neural basis. However, there is rather little in common between consciousness as the neurologist would use it to diagnose the vegetative state, how the feminist would use it to support raising male consciousness of the economic plight of women and as the philosopher would use it when defining the really hard question of the subjective state of awareness induced by sensory qualities. When faced with this kind of problem it is usual to subdivide the term into more manageable perhaps partly operational definitions. Three meanings that capture aspects of consciousness are: (1) the neurology of the state of mind allowing coherent orientation to time and place (2) the selection of sensory or memorial information for awareness and (3) the voluntary control over overt responses. In each of these cases the mechanisms of consciousness overlap with one or more of the attentional networks that have been studied with the methods of cognitive neuroscience. In this paper we explore the overlap and discuss how to exploit the growing knowledge of attentional networks to constrain ideas of consciousness.

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The Phenomenology of Attention

Cited by 72 publications

References 46 publications

Adaptation and visual salience

Adaptation and visual salience

Summation of Visual Motion across Eye Movements Reflects a Nonspatial Decision Mechanism

Attentional Networks and Consciousness

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