Abstract
Visual attention evolved as an adaptive mechanism allowing us to cope with a rapidly changing environment. It enables the facilitated processing of relevant information, often automatically and governed by implicit motives. However, despite recent advances in understanding the relationship between consciousness and visual attention, the functional scope of unconscious attentional control is still under debate. Here, we present a novel masking paradigm in which volunteers were to distinguish between varying orientations of a briefly presented, masked grating stimulus. Combining signal detection theory and subjective measures of awareness, we show that performance on unaware trials was consistent with visual selection being weighted towards repeated orientations of Gabor patches and reallocated in response to a novel unconsciously processed orientation. This was particularly present in trials in which the prior feature was strongly weighted and only if the novel feature was invisible. Thus, our results provide evidence that invisible orientation stimuli can trigger the reallocation of history-guided visual selection weights.
Highlights
For survival in an unstable and uncertain world, it is crucial to detect contextual regularities, and to adapt quickly when they change
Less clear whether feature-based attention can be redirected towards a novel feature in response to changes in unconsciously processed targets: according to Bundesen’s theory of visual attention (TVA, Bundesen, 1990), the attentional selection is a mechanism that operates in the service of perceptual categorization, i.e., by aiding the selection of a potential target item within a distractor display (‘‘filtering’’), or the discrimination of features in single items
We demonstrated that unconscious feature changes of invisible targets can induce attentional reweighting against a prior attentional selection bias, suggesting that the shifting of attentional selection weights during the behavioral performance does not necessitate visual awareness
Summary
For survival in an unstable and uncertain world, it is crucial to detect contextual regularities, and to adapt quickly when they change. Previous studies examined the effect of exogenous invisible cues on the deployment of external visual selective attention, suggesting that subliminal spatial cues can capture attention and facilitate task performance at the cued location (McCormick, 1997; Mulckhuyse et al, 2007; for a review see Mulckhuyse and Theeuwes, 2010), that the association between a subliminal cue and a visible target can be learned implicitly (Lambert et al, 1999) and that subliminal stimulus can even induce cognitive control processes like response inhibition or task-switching effects (Lau and Passingham, 2007; Van Gaal et al, 2008, 2010; Farooqui and Manly, 2015) This notion is further supported by evidence from clinical studies in ‘‘blindsight’’ patients, which indicate that visual cues presented in the patient’s blind field are still capable of directing spatial attention (Kentridge et al, 1999). Evidence is still missing as to whether such a feature-based selection bias can be elicited for subliminal, unconsciously processed stimuli and whether it can be reweighted flexibly in response to feature changes of the unconsciously processed stimulus
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