Attention improves or impairs visual performance by enhancing spatial resolution

ABSTRACT Covert attention, the selective processing of visual information at a given location in the absence of eye movements, improves performance in several tasks, such as visual search

and detection of luminance and vernier targets1,2,3,4,5,6. An important unsettled issue is whether this improvement is due to a reduction in noise (internal or external)6,7,8,9, a change in

decisional criteria10,11, or signal enhancement3,5,12. Here we show that attention can affect performance by signal enhancement. For a texture segregation task in which performance is

actually diminished when spatial resolution is too high, we observed that attention improved performance at peripheral locations where spatial resolution was too low, but impaired

performance at central locations where spatial resolution was too high4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12. The counterintuitive impairment of performance that we found at the central retinal locations

appears to have only one possible explanation: attention enhances spatial resolution. Access through your institution Buy or subscribe This is a preview of subscription content, access via

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* Learn about institutional subscriptions * Read our FAQs * Contact customer support SIMILAR CONTENT BEING VIEWED BY OTHERS FEATURE-BASED ATTENTION WARPS THE PERCEPTION OF VISUAL FEATURES

Article Open access 20 April 2023 INFORMATION-OPTIMAL LOCAL FEATURES AUTOMATICALLY ATTRACT COVERT AND OVERT ATTENTION Article Open access 15 June 2022 GRAVITATIONAL EFFECTS OF SCENE

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  ADS  Google Scholar  Download references ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study was supported by an NSF National Young Investigator Grant to M.C. and a Katzell Summer Fellowship to Y.Y. We thank K.

Adolph, L. Cameron, J. Fernández, K. Frieder, P.Glimcher, M. Landy, L. Maloney, B. McElree, D. Pelli, E. Phelps and S. Wolfson for their comments on a draft of this manuscript. AUTHOR

INFORMATION AUTHORS AND AFFILIATIONS * Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, 10003, New York, USA Yaffa Yeshurun & Marisa Carrasco Authors * Yaffa Yeshurun View author

publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Marisa Carrasco View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar CORRESPONDING

AUTHOR Correspondence to Marisa Carrasco. RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS Reprints and permissions ABOUT THIS ARTICLE CITE THIS ARTICLE Yeshurun, Y., Carrasco, M. Attention improves or impairs

visual performance by enhancing spatial resolution. _Nature_ 396, 72–75 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/23936 Download citation * Received: 17 August 1998 * Accepted: 14 September 1998 *

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