Cohen MC, Alvarez GA, Nakayama K.
The gist can be missed: Natural scene perception requires attention. Psychological Science. In Press.
AbstractIs visual attention required for visual consciousness? In the past decade, many have claimed that awareness can arise in the absence of attention. This claim is largely based on the notion that natural scene (or �gist�) perception occurs without attention. Against this, we first show that when observers perform a variety of demanding, sustained attention tasks, inattentional blindness occurs for natural scenes. In addition, scene perception is impaired under dual-task conditions, but only when using sufficiently demanding tasks. This suggests that previous studies claiming to have demonstrated scene perception without attention failed to fully engage attention and that natural scene perception does indeed require attention. Thus, natural scene perception is not a �preattentive� process and cannot be used to support the idea of awareness without attention.
Alvarez GA.
Attention and Action. In:
Ochsner K, Kosslyn S Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Neuroscience . Oxford University Press ; In Press.
AbstractAt every moment, we face choices: Is it time to work, or to play? Should I listen to this lecture, or check my e-mail? Should I pay attention to what my significant other is saying, or do a mental inventory of what work I need to accomplish today? Should I keep my hands on the wheel, or change the radio station? Without any change to the external environment, it is possible to select a subset of these possibilities for further action. The process of selection is called attention, and it operates in many domains, from selecting our higher-level goals, to selecting the sensory information on which we focus, to selecting what actions we perform. This chapter focuses on the relationship between visual attention (selecting visual inputs), and action (selecting and executing movements of the body). As a case study, we focus on visual-spatial attention, the act of choosing to attend to a particular location in the visual field, and its relationship to eye-movement control. Visual attention appears to select the targets for eye-movements, as attention to a location necessarily precedes an eye-movement to that location. Moreover, there is a great deal of overlap in the neural mechanisms that control spatial attention and eye-movements, and the neural mechanisms that are specialized for spatial attention or eye-movements are highly intertwined. This link between spatial attention and eye-movements strongly supports the idea that a computational goal of the visual attention system is to select targets for action, and suggests that many of the design properties of the spatial attention system might be optimized for the control of eye-movements. Whether this relationship will hold broadly between other forms of attention (e.g., goal selection, auditory selection, tactile selection), and other forms of action (e.g., hand movements and locomotion) is an important topic of contemporary and future research.