Opposing effects of attention and consciousness on afterimages
Abstract
The brain's ability to handle sensory information is influenced by both selective attention and consciousness. There is no consensus on the exact relationship between these two processes and whether they are distinct. So far, no experiment has simultaneously manipulated both. We carried out a full factorial 2 × 2 study of the simultaneous influences of attention and consciousness (as assayed by visibility) on perception, correcting for possible concurrent changes in attention and consciousness. We investigated the duration of afterimages for all four combinations of high versus low attention and visible versus invisible. We show that selective attention and visual consciousness have opposite effects: paying attention to the grating decreases the duration of its afterimage, whereas consciously seeing the grating increases the afterimage duration. These findings provide clear evidence for distinctive influences of selective attention and consciousness on visual perception.
Additional Information
© 2010 National Academy of Sciences. Edited by Anne Treisman, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved March 31, 2010 (received for review November 17, 2009). Published online before print April 27, 2010. The authors thank April Kartikasari and Jan Brascamp for comments on the manuscript, and Jan Brascamp and Tomas Knapen for insightful discussions. Support for this research was provided by a Rubicon grant of the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO; to J.J.A.v.B.), the National Science Foundation, the Mathers Foundation, The Gimbel Fund, and the WCU program through the National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (R31-2008-000-10008-0) (C.K.), and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (N.T.). Author contributions: J.J.A.v.B., N.T., and C.K. designed research; J.J.A.v.B. performed research; J.J.A.v.B. analyzed data; and J.J.A.v.B., N.T., and C.K. wrote the paper.Attached Files
Published - vanBoxtel2010p10149P_Natl_Acad_Sci_Usa.pdf
Supplemental Material - pnas.200913292SI.pdf
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC2889341
- Eprint ID
- 18506
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20100601-111633951
- Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO)
- NSF
- Mathers Foundation
- Gimbel Fund
- R31-2008-000-10008-0
- Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (Korea)
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)
- National Research Foundation of Korea
- Created
-
2010-06-02Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-08Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Koch Laboratory (KLAB)