Voluntary attention cannot be sustained for long periods, leading to a decline in perceptual sensitivity called the vigilance decrement. Training involving meditation practice—about 5 hours daily for 3 months—improved sustained attention. Participants were randomly assigned to receive training first or serve as waiting-list controls. Training improved visual discrimination, linked to increases in perceptual sensitivity and vigilance during sustained visual attention. These results suggest that perceptual improvements reduce the resource demand of target discrimination, making it easier to sustain voluntary attention.
People can automatically perceive the color diversity of an unattended visual display without sacrificing their ability to report a cued letter. This finding suggests that detailed visual information, such as the variety of colors, is registered outside focal attention and does not consume working memory resources. The result supports the idea that visual experience may overflow what can be reported, offering a way to study phenomenal consciousness without relying solely on limited-capacity report.