Nature Neuroscience
- 9, 1243 - 1245 (2006)
Published online: 10 September 2006; | doi:10.1038/nn1761
When sustained attention impairs perceptionSam Ling1 & Marisa Carrasco1, 21
Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, New York 10003, USA. 2
Center for Neural Science, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, New York 10003, USA.
Correspondence should be addressed to Sam Ling ling@nyu.edu Virtually all behavioral and neurophysiological studies have shown that sustained (endogenous, conceptually driven) attention enhances perception. But can this enhancement be held indefinitely? We assessed the time course of attention's effects on contrast sensitivity, reasoning that if attention does indeed boost stimulus strength, the strengthened representation could result in stronger adaptation over time. We found that attention initially enhances contrast sensitivity, but that over time sustained attention can actually impair sensitivity to an attended stimulus.
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