Pre-cueing, Perceptual Learning and Cognitive Penetration

In The Principles of Psychology, James (1981) suggested that attending to a stimulus can make it appear more “vivid and clear. ” Pre-cueing, the procedure in which a cue stimulus is presented to direct a subject’s attention to the location of a test stimulus, has been used to test James’ hypothesis (Posner, 1978, 1980; Carrasco et al., 2004, 2006; Yeshurun and Rashal, 2010; Carrasco, 2011; Kravitz and Behrmann, 2011). A recent debate concerns whether pre-cueing effects associated with covert attention involve cognitive penetration. In the context of information processing, cognitive penetration occurs when the information content of cognitive states directly influences perceptual computations in such a way as to alter their output1. Attention is the process that either enhances the representation of relevant information (e.g., a scene at a certain location or an aspect of a visual scene) at the system level or diminishes the representation of irrelevant noise. Studies show that attention boosts the apparent stimulus contrast (Carrasco et al., 2004) and increases contrast sensitivity, which seems to be mediated by contrast grain—an effect akin to a change in the physical contrast stimulus (Carrasco et al., 2006). In addition, attention enhances spatial identification accuracy (Yeshurun and Rashal, 2010) and aids in the segmentation of the retinal image by increasing both firstand second-order sensitivity to the attended location (Barbot et al., 2012). Attention can be allocated either by some bodily orientation of the organs by which an organism moves, say, when the eyes move in the direction of a target location (overt attention) or by shifting the direction of attention without reorienting the body, say, when attention is drawn by the salience of a cue while the eyes remain fixed (covert attention, see Findlay and Gilchrist, 2003). Cases that involve overt attention are not treated as cases of cognitive penetration because overt attention functions as a passive partition mechanism acting prior to the beginning of perceptual process (Pylyshyn, 1999; Macpherson, 2012; Deroy, 2013; Mole, 2015; Firestone and Scholl, 2016; Brogaard and Gatzia, 2017). Recently, however, it has been suggested that cases of covert attention are instances of cognitive penetration (Mole, 2015; Wu, in press) because covert attention functions as an active controlling influence of perceptual processing (Nanay, 2010; Carrasco, 2011, 2014). Overt and covert attention can be exogenous or endogenous. Exogenous attention corresponds to a reflexive, involuntary response to a location upon the occurrence of a sudden or intense stimulation—it is oriented in a stimulus-driven or bottom-up manner (Carrasco, 2006, 2011). For example, when letters appear abruptly on a computer screen, they capture the eyes’ attention and elicit faster responses than when they appear gradually (Yantis and Jonides, 1984; Jonides and Yantis, 1988). Endogenous attention corresponds to our ability to monitor stimulus information (typically based on a cue) voluntarily—it is oriented in a goal-driven or top-down manner (Carrasco, 2006, 2011). For example, we often prepare for an expected event by orienting attention