Erik Blaser

University of Massachusetts Boston

Our work attempts to isolate the underlying processing resources of visual attention from the ‘cognitive
supervision’ - working memory, decision processes, but especially awareness - that typically accompanies their
allocation. Even when such cognitive supervision is removed - say, driving while day-dreaming - we argue that
there must remain a context-dependent, flexible shuttling of resources between visual stimuli; a shadow
economy of what we term ‘dark attention’. In practice it is notoriously difficult to tease apart resource allocation
from awareness (‘‘Please attend solely to the red dots on the left while keeping your awareness just on the
green dots on the right”). To decouple them, we used the motion aftereffect (MAE) as a passive assay (starting
largely with Chaudhuri, 1990 it has been well-established that withdrawing ‘attention’ from an adapting field
drastically reduces the resulting MAE). In our main condition, observers were presented with an adapting field,
but did not attend to it. Instead their effort was directed to an engrossing auditory two-back memory task.
Consequently, observers had no consistent awareness of the adaptor, nor were they able to make accurate
judgements about its luminance, but surprisingly had MAE’s no smaller than those induced when the adaptor
was fully attended. Similarly to when object- or feature-based attention spreads unwittingly, visual attention can
indeed ‘go dark’: processing resources were automatically directed to the adapting field, without requiring or
engaging awareness.