Abstract
We investigated the effects of attention on localization with two converging manipulations of attention. The results indicated that whereas attention improved localization, minimally attended stimuli were nonetheless localized fairly accurately. The distributions of localization responses around peripheral stimuli were asymmetric, with a greater dispersion along the axis linking fixation to stimulus location relative to its perpendicular axis. We propose that the unattended field comprises attentional receptive fields that are mediated by coarse location detectors. We speculate that attention produces fine localization by facilitating computations that integrate the relative activation of overlapping detectors.
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This research was supported by Grant 06 10710551 from the Israel Academy of Sciences.
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Tsal, Y., Bareket, T. Localization judgments under various levels of attention. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 12, 559–566 (2005). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193805
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193805