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Updated: Aug 7, 2026
09:37
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.
Acta Psychologica
|August 1, 1993
Summary
Preattentive visual processing is too basic to capture details of ignored objects. Unattended figures are processed with very limited feature information, impacting shape and gap recognition.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Visual Perception
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Selective attention is crucial for processing visual information.
- Understanding the limits of preattentive processing is key to visual perception research.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the level of detail processed by preattentive vision for unattended objects.
- To determine if global shape and local features are encoded when attention is elsewhere.
Main Methods:
- Participants selectively attended to one of two novel, interleaved figures.
- Recognition tests assessed perception of the ignored figure's shape and contour gaps.
Main Results:
- Recognition of shape and contour gap location for ignored figures was at chance level.
- Recognition of contour gap presence was significantly below chance level.
Conclusions:
- Preattentive visual processing is insufficient for encoding global shape and local features of unattended objects.
- Visual representations of unattended objects contain minimal feature information.
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