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Nature Research, Nature Neuroscience, 12(14), p. 1513-1515, 2011

DOI: 10.1038/nn.2948

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Attention induces conservative subjective biases in visual perception

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Although attention usually enhances perceptual sensitivity, we found that it can also lead to relatively conservative detection biases and lower visibility ratings in discrimination tasks. These results are explained by a model in which attention reduces the trial-by-trial variability of the perceptual signal, and we determined how this model led to the observed behavior. These findings may partially reflect our impression of 'seeing' the whole visual scene despite our limited processing capacity outside of the focus of attention.