Pre-Cueing Effects: Attention or Mental Imagery?

Much has been written recently about cognitive penetration. If there are perceptual computations that are directly influenced by the information content of certain cognitive states such that the changes in the output of these computations can be accounted for in terms of the content of the penetrating cognitive states, we can talk about the cognitive penetration of perceptual processing.1 When considering the possible mechanisms that could mediate cognitive penetration, attention, traditionally, is quickly sidelined as a phenomenon that is trivially unable to exert the right kind of effect on perception. Even if the allocation of goal-directed (top-down, endogenous) attention is driven by the content of certain cognitive states (i.e., goal representations), it does not have a direct influence on perceptual processing itself. For, according to the traditional characterization, attention acts as a filter, a gatekeeper (Broadbent, 1958), or a spotlight (Posner, 1980) that selects and enhances certain signals (corresponding to attended stimuli) while attenuating or filtering out competing signals “prior to the operation of early vision” (Pylyshyn, 1999: p. 344). This traditional understanding has recently been questioned by empirical findings demonstrating that attention is not a passive gatekeeper mechanism acting before the start of perceptual processing, but rather an active modulator of perceptual computations that is able to exert many different effects at many different levels of the perceptual hierarchy (see e.g., Reynolds and Chelazzi, 2004; Nanay, 2010b; Noudoost et al., 2010; Carrasco, 2011, 2014; Lupyan, 2015; Wu, in press). However, despite this transition from seeing attention as passive gatekeeper to seeing it as an active modulator, opponents still argue against attention-mediated cognitive penetration on the basis of the filter-like nature of attention. As Firestone and Scholl have recently put it, attending is “importantly analogous to seeing through a tinted lens —merely increasing sensitivity to certain features rather than others” (Firestone and Scholl, 2017: p. 23, but see also Lupyan, in press).