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Enhanced : Separating the Wheat from the Chaff
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Kanwisher, Nancy Downing, Paul |
| Copyright Year | 2004 |
| Abstract | Seeing the world around you is like drinking from a firehose. The flood of information that enters the eyes could easily overwhelm the capacity of the visual system. To solve this problem, a mechanism-attention-allows selective processing of the information relevant to current goals. As the eminent physiological psychologist Helmholtz [HN2], [HN3], [HN4] noted over a hundred years ago, even without moving our eyes we can focus our attention on different objects at will, resulting in very different perceptual experiences of the same visual input (1). Visual attention has been the focus of several decades of elegant behavioral research, but the neural basis of this process has come under intensive investigation only recently [HN5], [HN6], [HN7]. A report by Kastner et al. on page 108 (2), in which the authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain in awake human subjects performing visual tasks, provides new clues about how our brains deal with the onslaught of sensory input. Try a version of Helmholtz's experiment for yourself. Fix your eyes on the cross at the center of the figure (below), and without moving your eyes read the letters around the circle one letter at a time, starting at the top. Attention enhances your awareness of the selected letter, relegating the rest to the margins of consciousness. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://web.mit.edu/bcs/nklab/media/pdfs/KanwisherDowningScience98.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
