Attentional enhancement opposite a peripheral flash revealed using change blindness.
We describe a new method for mapping spatial attention that reveals a pooling of attention in the hemifield opposite a peripheral flash. Our method exploits the fact that a brief full-field blank can interfere with the detection of changes in a scene that occur during the blank. Attending to the location of a change, however, can overcome this change blindness, so that changes are detected. The likelihood of detecting a new element in a scene therefore provides a measure of the occurrence of attention at that element's location. Using this measure, we mapped how attention changes in response to a task-irrelevant peripheral cue. Under conditions of visual fixation, change detection was above chance across the entire visual area tested. In addition, a "hot spot" of attention (corresponding to near-perfect change detection) elongated along the cue-fixation axis, such that performance improved not only at the cued location but also in the opposite hemifield.
Tse
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Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA.
Sheinberg
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Logothetis
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D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003118:Color Perception; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D008297:Male; D008432:Mathematical Computing; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011601:Psychophysics; D011930:Reaction Time; D014794:Visual Fields