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Attention improves or impairs visual performance by enhancing spatial resolution

Nature volume 396, pages 72–75 (1998)Cite this article

Abstract

Covert attention, the selective processing of visual information at a given location in the absence of eye movements, improves performance in several tasks, such as visual search and detection of luminance and vernier targets1,2,3,4,5,6. An important unsettled issue is whether this improvement is due to a reduction in noise (internal or external)6,7,8,9, a change in decisional criteria10,11, or signal enhancement3,5,12. Here we show that attention can affect performance by signal enhancement. For a texture segregation task in which performance is actually diminished when spatial resolution is too high, we observed that attention improved performance at peripheral locations where spatial resolution was too low, but impaired performance at central locations where spatial resolution was too high4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12. The counterintuitive impairment of performance that we found at the central retinal locations appears to have only one possible explanation: attention enhances spatial resolution.

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Figure 1: Texture segregation task.
Figure 2: Observers' performance as a function of cueing condition and target eccentricity.
Figure 3: Observers' performance as a function of viewing distance and cueing condition.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by an NSF National Young Investigator Grant to M.C. and a Katzell Summer Fellowship to Y.Y. We thank K. Adolph, L. Cameron, J. Fernández, K. Frieder, P.Glimcher, M. Landy, L. Maloney, B. McElree, D. Pelli, E. Phelps and S. Wolfson for their comments on a draft of this manuscript.

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  1. Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, 10003, New York, USA

    Yaffa Yeshurun & Marisa Carrasco

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  1. Yaffa Yeshurun
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  2. Marisa Carrasco
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Correspondence to Marisa Carrasco.

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Yeshurun, Y., Carrasco, M. Attention improves or impairs visual performance by enhancing spatial resolution. Nature 396, 72–75 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/23936

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