Natural-Scene Perception Requires Attention

Michael A Cohen,George A Alvarez,Ken Nakayama

doi:10.1177/0956797611419168

Abstract

Is visual attention required for visual consciousness? In the past decade, many researchers have claimed that awareness can arise in the absence of attention. This claim is largely based on the notion that natural scene (or “gist”) perception occurs without attention. This article presents evidence against this idea. We show that when observers perform a variety of demanding, sustained-attention tasks, inattentional blindness occurs for natural scenes. In addition, scene perception is impaired under dual-task conditions, but only when the primary task is sufficiently demanding. This finding suggests that previous studies that have been interpreted as demonstrating scene perception without attention failed to fully engage attention and that natural-scene perception does indeed require attention. Thus, natural-scene perception is not a preattentive process and cannot be used to support the idea of awareness without attention.

Highlights

Is visual attention required for visual consciousness? In the past decade, many researchers have claimed that awareness can arise in the absence of attention
The combined results of Experiments 1a and 1b stand in stark contrast to Mack and Rock’s (1998) results, which did not include a single instance of inattentional blindness for scenes presented with a 30-ms duration
The predominant view is that certain classes of stimuli—in particular, natural scenes— can be perceived without attention—that is, “preattentively.” What reason is there to believe in awareness without attention? Initially, this position was supported by the finding that basic visual features pop out in visual search (Treisman & Gelade, 1980)

Summary

Introduction

Many researchers have claimed that awareness can arise in the absence of attention This claim is largely based on the notion that natural scene (or “gist”) perception occurs without attention. Perhaps naturalscene perception has been classified incorrectly as a preattentive process because it is so efficient that it requires very little attention, and is relatively impervious to dualtask interference and inattentional blindness. This second possibility has been hinted at in studies using the attentional blink 2010), dual-task situations (Rousselet, Thorpe, & Fabre-Thorpe, 2004; Walker, Stafford, & Davis, 2008), rapid presentation (Evans & Treisman, 2005), and perception of two superimposed scenes (Neisser & Becklen, 1975) to show that natural-scene perception can be compromised under specific experimental conditions

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Conclusion