Attention warps reality
Image: iStock/luismmolina
Notice that, even as you fixate on the screen in front of you, you can still shift your attention to different regions in your peripheries. For decades, cognitive scientists have conceptualized attention as akin to a shifting spotlight that “illuminates” regions it shines upon, or as a zoom lens, focusing on things so that we see them in finer detail. These metaphors are commonplace because they capture the intuition that attention illuminates or sharpens things, and thus, enhances our perception of them.
Some of the important early studies to directly confirm this intuition were conducted by NYU psychologist Marisa Carrasco and colleagues, who showed that attention enhances the perceived sharpness of attended patterns. In their experiment, participants saw two textured patterns presented side-by-side on a computer screen, and judged which of the two patterns looked sharper. However, just before the patterns appeared, an attention-attracting cue was flashed at the upcoming location of one of the patterns. They found that attended patterns were perceived as sharper than physically identical unattended patterns. In other words, attention may make physically blurry (or otherwise degraded) images appear sharper – much like a zoom lens on a camera.
Subsequent studies by Carrasco’s group and others found that attention also enhances perception of other features – for example, color saturation , orientation , and speed . This research suggests that attention causes incoming sensory information from attended locations to be processed more fully, without changing the information itself.
However, some recent work at the cutting edge of vision science has begun to chip away at this intuitive notion, suggesting that attention can sometimes distort perception, changing the very character of our visual experience. In onestudy , Satoru Suzuki of Northwestern and Patrick Cavanagh of Harvard presented observers with a display in which two vertical lines were drawn one underneath the other, and asked them to judge whether the top line occurred to the left or right of the bottom line. Just before the lines were presented, an attention-attracting cue was briefly flashed. When the cue appeared near the lines, attention caused a curious distortion of perceived space, shifting the perceived locations of the lines away from the location of the cue. For example, on trials where the lines were perfectly aligned, the attentional cue caused them to be perceptually misaligned. The authors named this the attentional repulsion effect, since it seems attention repels the perceived locations of neighboring objects away from the focus of attention.
In explaining these results, Suzuki & Cavanagh cite neuroscience research showing that shifts of attention move the receptive fields of neurons in the peripheries towards the focus of attention. For example, if you pay attention to a bottle of water before you, then neurons whose receptive fields would normally fall outside the edges of the bottle will be recruited to gather information about the bottle as well. One consequence of having so many additional neurons encoding the space within and immediately surrounding the bottle is that this space may be “overrepresented”, possibly explaining why a newly appearing object in this vicinity is perceived as further away from the bottle than it truly is.
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3 Comments
Add CommentI think this is not any discovery; I think we know this intuitively. You see it in art, in descriptions, in your own experience. I've been aware of this since I was about 10; basically it's why we can make the moon look so big, because in our mind, it is big. Sunsets and moonrises are especially easy to use to experience this; take a picture, then stare at the real landscape, fix the size of the Sun/Moon, maybe later make a quick sketch and then go look at the photograph - you will see a very small object compared to your perception of it. This becomes evident also when you think about the surfaces we view images on (flat) and the shape of both our outer eye and optical nerve (curved). You can see a similar effect in a movie when panning a zoomed lens; watch the sides and things will "distort" back towards their real shapes as they approach the center, and distort as they move away. We see biggest and best at what we focus on with the center of our eyes, it's so obvious, it is overlooked.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisperhaps these "distortions" are relative truths as with everything. what is the difference between reality and perceived reality?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree largely with promytius, but would add that taking a picture with a camera is not that simple at all as it sounds. camera of what size, what kind of lens? to replicate our mind zooming position, you need to find the respective camera-lens zooming set up. the more precise you try to be, the more difficult it becomes. if you use a telephoto lens of let's say 500mm on a 35mm camera, won't the moon probably be larger than the moon on our drawing of the moonrise?
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