Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 7, 2026

Measurement of Neurophysiological Signals of Ignoring and Attending Processes in Attention Control
Published on: July 5, 2015
Inattention and the perception of visual features
R D Wright1, A N Katz, E A Hughes
1Dept. of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.
Abstract:
Subjects selectively attended to one of two interleaved, novel figures while ignoring the other figure. In subsequent tests administered to determine the extent to which the ignored figure was perceived, recognition of shape and the location of contour gaps was at the chance level. Moreover, recognition of the presence of contour gaps was significantly below the chance level. These results indicate that preattentive visual processing of unattended objects is too crude to encode global shape and local features such as contour gaps. It is suggested that preattentive processing creates visual representations of unattended objects that contain very limited information about features.
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