Visual attention: Spotlights, highlights and visual awareness

The phenomenon of visual attention has long fascinated scientists interested in higher functions of the brain. Introspection suggests that attention exerts a powerful influence on the flow of visual information within our brains: everyone is familiar with the experience of attending so intently to a particular object in the visual world that he/she is oblivious to other salient stimuli present simultaneously. In recent decades, cognitive psychology has produced an extraordinary wealth of data confirming this basic intuition. Attention has been manipulated in the laboratory using a number of clever behavioral paradigms, and the effects of attention on visually-based detection and recognition are indeed profound (reviewed in [1–4]).