Attended but unseen: Visual attention is not sufficient for visual awareness

Attended but unseen: visual attention is not sufficient for visual awareness.

Does any one psychological process give rise to visual awareness? One candidate is selective attention-when we attend to something it seems we always see it. But if attention can selectively enhance our response to an unseen stimulus then attention cannot be a sufficient precondition for awareness. Kentridge, Heywood & Weiskrantz [Kentridge, R. W., Heywood, C. A., & Weiskrantz, L. (1999). Atten...

The mere exposure effect is modulated by selective attention but not visual awareness

Repeated exposures to an object will lead to an enhancement of evaluation toward that object. Although this mere exposure effect may occur when the objects are presented subliminally, the role of conscious perception per se on evaluation has never been examined. Here we use a binocular rivalry paradigm to investigate whether a variance in conscious perceptual duration of faces has an effect on ...

Subthreshold features of visual objects: Unseen but not unbound

The object is a basic unit that is thought to organize the way in which we perceive and think about the world. According to theories of object-based attention, perception of unified objects depends on the binding together of the disparate features of each object via attention. Here we show that a visual feature that is not consciously perceived is nonetheless modulated by object-based attention...

Visual attention: Spotlights, highlights and visual awareness

The phenomenon of visual attention has long fascinated scientists interested in higher functions of the brain. Introspection suggests that attention exerts a powerful influence on the flow of visual information within our brains: everyone is familiar with the experience of attending so intently to a particular object in the visual world that he/she is oblivious to other salient stimuli present ...

3 . Visual Attention and Visual Awareness