Natural-Scene Perception Requires Attention

Abstract

Is visual attention required for visual consciousness? In the past decade, many have claimed that awareness can arise in the absence of attention. This claim is largely based on the notion that natural scene (or "gist") perception occurs without attention. Against this, we first show that when observers perform a variety of demanding, sustained attention tasks, inattentional blindness occurs for natural scenes. In addition, scene perception is impaired under dual-task conditions, but only when using sufficiently demanding tasks. This suggests that previous studies claiming to have demonstrated scene perception without attention failed to fully engage attention and that natural scene perception does indeed require attention. Thus, natural scene perception is not a preattentive process and cannot be used to support the idea of awareness without attention.