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Spatial attention alters visual appearance
Open accessAbstract
It is well established that attention improves performance on many visual tasks. However, for more than 100 years, psychologists, philosophers, and neurophysiologists have debated its phenomenology-whether attention actually changes one's subjective experience. Here, we show that it is possible to objectively and quantitatively investigate the effects of attention on subjective experience. First, we review evidence showing that attention alters the appearance of many static and dynamic basic visual dimensions, which mediate changes in appearance of higher-level perceptual aspects. Then, we summarize current views on how attention alters appearance. These findings have implications for our understanding of perception and attention, illustrating that attention affects not only how we perform in visual tasks, but actually alters our experience of the visual world.
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“More recently, cognitive psychological studies have characterized the particular ways, in which attention can influence perception, from low-level visual features to high-level perceptual judgments (for review see ref. 43).”
From Paying attention to attention in depression (2019) · cites this paper as [43]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Carrasco, M., & Barbot, A.
- Affiliations
- New York University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Carrasco, Marisa
- Venue
- Current Opinion in Psychology
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2019-10
- Volume
- 29
- Pages
- 56-64
- ISSN
- 2352-250X (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC7661009
- OpenAlex
- W2932325023
- Cited by
- 161
- References
- 95
- Citations by year
- 2026: 16 · 2025: 20 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 40 · 2022: 17 · 2021: 21 · 2020: 19 · 2019: 10
- FWCI
- 1.70
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Current Opinion in Psychology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (R01 EY019693, NEI R01 EY027401)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Visual perception and processing mechanisms
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Keywords
- spatial attention, visual appearance, subjective experience, attentional capture, visual perception, perceptual dimensions
- MeSH terms
- Attention, Brain, Humans, Photic Stimulation, Visual Perception, Contrast Sensitivity
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