Attention induces conservative subjective biases in visual perception

• Published in: Nature neuroscience Vol. 14; no. 12; pp. 1513 - 1515
• Main Authors: Rahnev, Dobromir, Maniscalco, Brian, Graves, Tashina, Huang, Elliott, de Lange, Floris P, Lau, Hakwan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Nature Publishing Group US 01.12.2011; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 631/378/116; 631/378/2613; 631/378/2649/1310; 631/378/2649/1723; Analysis; Animal Genetics and Genomics; Attention - physiology; Behavioral Sciences; Bias; Biological Techniques; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedicine; brief-communication; Discrimination (Psychology) - physiology; Experiments; Eye; Humans; Models, Psychological; Movements; Neurobiology; Neurosciences; Photic Stimulation - methods; Psychophysics; Sensitivity and Specificity; Space Perception - physiology; Visual perception; Visual Perception - physiology; United States; New York; United States > US
• ISSN: 1097-6256; 1546-1726; 1546-1726
• DOI: 10.1038/nn.2948

In this behavioral study, the authors demonstrate how increased attention can sometimes lead to lower subject confidence, leading subjects to become more conservative in making decisions during a visual perception task. Although attention usually enhances perceptual sensitivity, we found that it can also lead to relatively conservative detection biases and lower visibility ratings in discrimination tasks. These results are explained by a model in which attention reduces the trial-by-trial variability of the perceptual signal, and we determined how this model led to the observed behavior. These findings may partially reflect our impression of 'seeing' the whole visual scene despite our limited processing capacity outside of the focus of attention.