Training Under Attentional Competition Produces Persistent Biases in Visual Appearance

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Selective attention can temporarily modify visual perception.
• It remains unclear if these attentional effects on appearance can be learned and become lasting.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether training attention under conditions of sensory competition leads to enduring changes in perceived visual contrast.
• To determine if such training recalibrates subjective visual appearance.

Main Methods:

• Participants underwent seven days of training on an orientation task.
• Training involved either a fixed target location with a salient distractor (sensory competition) or without a distractor.
• Perceived contrast was measured using the point of subjective equality (PSE) before and after training.

Main Results:

• Training under sensory competition induced a "push-pull" shift in perceived contrast.
• Stimuli at the trained location appeared to have higher contrast, while stimuli at the untrained location appeared to have lower contrast.
• Training without distractors improved task performance but did not alter perceived contrast.

Conclusions:

• Resolving sensory competition through attention training leads to durable recalibration of subjective visual appearance.
• These learned effects on perception are robust, generalize to new stimuli, and are not solely due to response bias improvements.