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Related Experiment Video

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Measuring Attention and Visual Processing Speed by Model-based Analysis of Temporal-order Judgments
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Attention as inference: selection is probabilistic; responses are all-or-none samples.

Edward Vul1, Deborah Hanus, Nancy Kanwisher

  • 1Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. evul@mit.edu

Journal of Experimental Psychology. General
|November 4, 2009
PubMed
Summary

This study reconciles probabilistic cognition theories with discrete subjective experiences. It shows that visual selective attention operates gradually, with responses sampled from these probabilistic internal states.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Neuroscience
  • Psychology

Background:

  • Probabilistic cognition theories suggest internal representations involve multiple hypotheses with associated probabilities.
  • Subjective experiences and responses are often discrete, appearing as all-or-none states, not graded probabilities.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To reconcile the discrepancy between probabilistic internal representations and discrete subjective states.
  • To investigate how graded, probabilistic representations in cognition can lead to discrete phenomenal experiences.

Main Methods:

  • Selective attention tasks were reframed as probabilistic inference problems.
  • Subjects performed multiple guesses per trial.
  • Second-order statistics were employed to analyze the data.

Main Results:

  • Visual selective attention was found to operate in a graded manner across time and space.
  • Multiple targets can be selected to varying degrees within a single trial.
  • Responses are generated through a sampling process from probabilistic internal states.

Conclusions:

  • Individuals represent information using probability distributions.
  • Discrete conscious states and responses arise from a sampling mechanism applied to these probabilistic representations.