Abstract
Carrasco, Ling, and Read (2004) reported that involuntary attention increased perceived contrast. We replicated Carrasco et al. and then tested anaalternative hypothesis: With stimuli near threshold, a peripheral cue biased observers to believe a stimulus had been presented in the cued location. Consistent with this hypothesis, the effect disappeared when we used higher-contrast stimuli. We further tested the guessing-bias hypothesis in three ways: (1) In a detection experiment, the cue affected bias, but did not increase d'; (2) when the cue followed the stimulus, we obtained the same results as when the cue preceded the stimulus; (3) in one experiment, some trials contained no stimulus, yet observers responded that the cued blank stimulus had higher contrast than the uncued blank stimulus. The results suggest that the effects of a noninformative peripheral cue are best described in terms of nonperceptual biases.
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This research was based, in part, on an honors thesis by V.L. at the University of California, Berkeley. We thank Jeffrey Tsai, Beibei Luo, Jonathan Hirschberg, and Deena Elwan for their help running the experiments, and Sam Ling for providing the software used by Carrasco et al. (2004).
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Prinzmetal, W., Long, V. & Leonhardt, J. Involuntary attention and brightness contrast. Perception & Psychophysics 70, 1139–1150 (2008). https://doi.org/10.3758/PP.70.7.1139
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/PP.70.7.1139