Attention and scintillation

The scintillating grid is a recently discovered visual illusion, created by superimposing white discs on the intersections of orthogonal gray bars on a black background. Even though the entire display is stationary, observers perceive dark spots appearing and disappearing rapidly within some of the white discs. This scintillation effect is correlated with eye position and eye movements. Here we investigate whether covert shifts of attention, as revealed by cueing and visual search paradigms, can also affect the illusion. We find that the chance of a particular intersection scintillating is directly correlated with distance from the attentional focus, regardless of the location of the fixation point. This suggests that the dynamics of this illusion might reflect the distribution of attention in space and time.