Covert attention increases spatial resolution with or without masks: support for signal enhancement.

By Marisa Carrasco, P. E. Williams, Yaffa Yeshurun. Journal of Vision, 2002

302 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Visual attention can increase spatial resolution even when it leads to a decrease in performance. Whether this effect is mediated by reduction of external noise or by signal enhancement is an unsettled question. Although we previously demonstrated that attention can improve speed and accuracy in an acuity task, those experiments made use of a local postmask, which could be considered a source of external noise. In this work, a peripheral cue improved observers' abilities to indicate which side of a Landolt-square target had a gap whether or not a local postmask was used and with both central- and spread-neutral cues. In addition, we documented the presence of visual field inhomogeneities in a resolution task. Given that these experiments presented the target alone with no external noise added (i.e., without distracters or masks), our results indicate that transient attention enhanced the quality of the stimulus representation. Furthermore, because performance in the Landolt-square task indexes resolution, this attentional benefit indicates that transient attention can produce signal enhancement through finer spatial resolution.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d9e153387cf5d52ef03cb5cc6846e3ddd58184f6

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Peripheral vision and pattern recognition: a review. (2011, background): “40 High contrast character recognition and acuity in eccentric vision are crucially affected by the deployment of spatial attention (Nakayama & Mackeben, 1989; Mackeben, 1999; Carrasco et al., 2002; Talgar et al., 2004).”
Multisensory Spatial Attention Deficits Are Predictive of Phonological Decoding Skills in Developmental Dyslexia (2010, background): “For example, spatial attention improves perception in many visual tasks, such as contrast sensitivity, texture segmentation, and visual search, by diminishing the effect of noise outside the focus of attention, intensifying the signal, and enhancing spatial resolution (Carrasco, Williams, & Yeshurum”
Action-Video-Game Experience Alters the Spatial Resolution of Vision (2007, background): “…much previous research documents that visual spatial resolution is enhanced when exogenous cues are used to reduce spatial and temporal uncertainty (Carrasco, Williams, & Yeshurun, 2002; Yeshurun & Carrasco, 1999) and that performance is impaired when a difﬁcult secondary task is added (Zenger,…”
Saliency-based Sequential Image Attention with Multiset Prediction (2017, background): “This suggests activations with higher spatial resolution are needed, perhaps by incorporating dilated convolutions [45] or using lower-level activations at attended areas, motivated by covert attention’s known enhancement of spatial resolution [6, 7, 14].”
Visual attention: The past 25 years (2011, background): “…such a possibility is consistent with attention accelerating information accrual (Carrasco, Giordano, & McElree, 2004, 2006; Carrasco & McElree, 2001; Smith, 2000), and is plausible when there was a backward mask, it is not plausible in the absence of such a backward mask (Carrasco et al., 2002).”
Brain plasticity through the life span: learning to learn and action video games. (2012, background): “In contrast, resources such as attention are typically called on when a target needs to be selected in time or space from distractors or when the time and/or place of arrival of the stimulus is uncertain (Carrasco et al. 2002).”
Effect of action video games on the spatial distribution of visuospatial attention. (2006, background): “The fact that the distractors-present condition requires the successful selection of the target from among competing alternatives suggests that VGPs do indeed display an enhancement in visual selective attention, which has been shown to increase the spatial resolution of visual processing ( Carrasco”