How the deployment of attention determines what we see

Abstract

Attention is a tool to adapt what we see to our current needs. It can be focused narrowly on a single object or spread over several or distributed over the scene as a whole. In addition to increasing or decreasing the number of attended objects, these different deployments may have different effects on what we see. This article describes some research both on focused attention and its use in binding features, and on distributed attention and the kinds of information we gain and lose with the attention window opened wide. One kind of processing that we suggest occurs automatically with distributed attention results in a statistical description of sets of similar objects. Another gives the gist of the scene, which may be inferred from sets of features registered in parallel. Flexible use of these different modes of attention allows us to reconcile sharp capacity limits with a richer understanding of the visual scene.

Notes

¹Note, however, that some physical conjunctions may create emergent features, which could also play a part in activating only recognition units with which they are compatible (see, for example, Treisman & Paterson, 1984).

²While conscious perception in the theory depends on object files, the converse may not be the case. Binding can sometimes occur without the bound objects becoming consciously accessible. For example, in the negative priming paradigm with only two objects present, accurate binding can happen without attention. The attended object is consciously and correctly bound, and the remaining features belonging to the unattended object are bound by default, with the resulting object tokens surviving sometimes for several days or weeks (Treisman & DeSchepper, 1996). However, the unattended shape may fail to be consciously registered.