Yeshurun Y, Carrasco M
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York 10003, USA.
Nature. 1998 Nov 5;396(6706):72-5. doi: 10.1038/23936.
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 targets. An important unsettled issue is whether this improvement is due to a reduction in noise (internal or external), a change in decisional criteria, or signal enhancement. 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 high. The counterintuitive impairment of performance that we found at the central retinal locations appears to have only one possible explanation: attention enhances spatial resolution.
隐蔽注意，即在不进行眼动的情况下对给定位置的视觉信息进行选择性加工，能提高多项任务的表现，如视觉搜索以及对亮度和游标目标的检测。一个重要的未解决问题是，这种表现的提高是由于噪声（内部或外部）的减少、决策标准的改变，还是信号增强。在这里我们表明，注意可以通过信号增强来影响表现。对于一个空间分辨率过高时表现实际上会下降的纹理分离任务，我们观察到，注意提高了空间分辨率过低的周边位置的表现，但损害了空间分辨率过高的中央位置的表现。我们在中央视网膜位置发现的违反直觉的表现损害似乎只有一种可能的解释：注意增强了空间分辨率。
