Towards a Resolution Theory of Visual Attention

The present paper proposes that preattended visual information produce a coarse representation by automatically stimulating a detector that responds to a range of similar features. Directing attention to a given location improves the resolution of features by computing the relative activation of overlapping internal detectors. A selective review of the literature shows that the proposed distinction is supported by a variety of studies investigating diverse phenomena of target-background similarity effects, conjunctive search, illusory conjunctions, feature similarity effects, global precedence, shape discrimination, detection of signals, categorical search, curvature discrimination, and length perception.