Visual Attention in Crisis

Recent research on peripheral vision has led to a paradigm-shifting conclusion: vision science as a field must rethink visual attention. This article reviews the evidence for a crisis in attention science and examines supposedly attentional phenomena to ask which point to additional capacity limits. Based on the resulting list of critical phenomena, and what they have in common, I propose an alternative way to think about capacity limits and the underlying mechanisms.

Research on visual attention has uncovered significant anomalies, and some traditional methods may have inadvertently probed peripheral vision rather than attention. Vision science needs to rethink visual attention from the ground up. To facilitate this, for a year I banned the word “attention” in my lab. This constraint promoted a more precise discussion of attention-related phenomena, capacity limits, and mechanisms. The insights gained lead me to challenge attributing to “attention” those phenomena that can be better explained by perceptual processes, are predictable by an ideal observer model, or that otherwise may not require an additional mechanism. I enumerate a set of critical phenomena in need of explanation. Finally, I propose a unifying theory in which all perception results from performing a task, and tasks face a limit on complexity.