When Sustained Attention Impairs Perception

“Virtually all behavioral and neurophysiological studies have shown that sustained (endogenous, conceptually driven) attention enhances perception. But can this enhancement be held indefinitely? We assessed the time course of attention's effects on contrast sensitivity, reasoning that if attention does indeed boost stimulus strength, the strengthened representation could result in stronger adaptation over time. We found that attention initially enhances contrast sensitivity, but that over time sustained attention can actually impair sensitivity to an attended stimulus.”

 

The above is an excerpt from a paper by Dr. Sam Ling and Dr. Marisa Carrasco of 

New York University, I read an article about their research in a scientific journal.

I immediately begin thinking about the idea as it applies to understanding visual language. The body of work I’m currently working borrows its title from this scientific study on attention. When Sustained Attention Impairs Perception is a visual meditation I’ve created on the familiar or what is understood as familiar. I’ve taken photographs of common recognizable objects one sees everyday and created symmetric digital hybrids. I’ve created these objects with the idea of bending perception. The deeper one examines the objects it can be seen that the objects don’t exist at all at least not in the real world.

 

Each piece or meditation consists of one singular image in a collage, primarily a nine image collage. Again exploring the idea of sustained attention, upon first glance all the images appear to be the same but in fact each will be different. When Sustained Attention Impairs Perception is a body of work about meditation and how we perceive things. My hope is that the piece is understood allegorically and applied to a deeper social understanding of what we think we know.

 

Michael Reese

2008