Diverting attention impairs or improves performance by decreasing spatial resolution A Barbot, L A Bustamante, M Carrasco |
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Department of Psychology & CNS, New York University, NY, United States
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| Spatial resolution peaks at the fovea and declines with eccentricity. Heightened resolution is often useful but can be detrimental. For instance, in texture segmentation tasks constrained by resolution, performance peaks at mid-periphery, where resolution is optimal for the texture scale, and drops where resolution is either too low (periphery) or too high (central locations). Exogenous (involuntary) attention increases resolution at the attended area, improving performance at peripheral locations but impairing performance at central locations. Here, we investigated how exogenous attention affects performance at unattended areas. Observers detected or discriminated the shape of a texture patch embedded in a texture display, which appeared at several eccentricities. Exogenous attention was manipulated using uninformative peripheral precues. The locations of the precue and response cue matched (valid) or did not (invalid). Consistent with previous studies, performance in the neutral (distributed) attention condition peaked at mid-periphery and valid precues increased resolution, impairing and improving performance at central and peripheral locations, respectively. Conversely, with invalid precues, performance decreased at peripheral locations but improved at central locations, where increasing resolution hinders performance. Our findings reveal that, counterintuitively, diverting attention can improve performance by decreasing resolution, consistent with exogenous attention being an inflexible mechanism that trades-off spatial resolution. |
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