Conscious visual memory with minimal attention.
Journal of Experimental Psychology General January 30, 2017 Yair Pinto, Annelinde R. E. Vandenbroucke, Marte Otten et al. 23 citations
Change blindness—the failure to notice unattended changes in a visual scene—has been taken as evidence that conscious perception requires spatial attention. However, change blindness tasks introduce visual interference that forces reliance on working memory, which has limited capacity. Before such interference, a larger-capacity store called fragile memory exists. Two experiments show that minimizing spatial attention nearly eliminates visual working memory but leaves fragile memory largely intact. Furthermore, minimally attended fragile memory responses produce accurate metacognition, indicating that conscious memory persists with limited spatial attention. These findings suggest that both visual consciousness and memory can be supported by only minimal attention.