Effects of attention on visual discrimination and awareness: Evidence from eye-specific attention.

Abstract

The role of attention in visual awareness is a foundational issue for understanding consciousness, but remains highly controversial. Therefore, in two experiments, we investigated whether and how attention modulates visual awareness using a monocular cuing paradigm. Although observers are not aware of which eye received a cue, a monocular cue can attract eye-specific attention to a cued eye. In Experiment 1, we found that eye-specific attention enhanced subjective visual awareness (i.e., awareness reports) as well as objective task performance (i.e., orientation discrimination) of a Gabor target. Importantly, attention enhanced visual awareness only when a decision for orientation discrimination was correct, suggesting that the effect of attention on visual awareness is closely associated with perceptual evidence for orientation discrimination. In Experiment 2, we showed that the modulatory effect of attention on visual awareness was based on contrast gain, which amplified the effective contrast of an attended stimulus, and did not differ from that on orientation discrimination performance qualitatively and quantitatively. Our findings suggest that attention influences visual awareness by amplifying perceptual evidence on which visual awareness and objective performance are commonly based. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).