ABSTRACT
The idea that visual attention acts as an internal spotlight, benefiting visual perception, has gained more recent support from the work of Posner and his colleagues. The effects of distributing attention across the field may also be to enhance the detectability of relatively coarse stimulus information at the expense of local stimulus properties; the converse may be true of focused attention. Common movement was one of the attributes proposed by the Gestalt psychologists as important for perceptual organisation, and they seem able to attend to a set of moving stimuli even when they cross a cluttered, stationary background—as when a group of birds fly in front of a tree. Feature integration theory can also be used to account for the results of experiments on “texture discrimination”. In experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, Beck and his colleagues reported several important findings.
