Chapter 8 Twelve spatiotemporal phenomena and one explanation

A metatheory of various “pertentional” effects and phenomena is presented. The concept of pertention is introduced to provide a common denominator for a variety of perceptual and attentional phenomena that may be based on the workings of the same psychophysiological mechanism. Various experimental paradigms that have been used to investigate pertentional events in isolation are brought together on the assumption that a common, two-process (perceptual retouch) theory may be capable of explaining the majority of the effects found. The theory departs from the assumption that most of the data on which our theorising is grounded is itself a function of the subjects' reports on the phenomenal content of their perceptions. The subjects who are presented with spatiotemporal physical events in the laboratory are capable of providing this data insofar as conscious representations of the physical events are created. The ample evidence about high-level preconscious processing forces one to assume that the processing which is mediated by the specific data processing cortical modules is not sufficient to guarantee—through the subjects' reports—the empirical basis for our theories. This necessarily demands that we look for the neurophysiological mechanisms that are necessary in order to upgrade the specific activity so as to form directly reportable (“conscious”) representations. The characteristics of the socalled nonspecific system of modulation and the operating principles of this system in its interaction with cortical specific modules forms the basis for several experimentally testable predictions about the psychophysical outcomes of pertention when two brief, spatially localised stimuli (stimulus events) are presented to subjects in rapid succession. The spontaneous interaction between the fast specific system of data representation and the slow nonspecific system of modulation of this representation quite naturally explains a wide variety of perceptual and attentional effects and phenomena such as metacontrast, mutual masking, proactive facilitation, paradoxical phenomena related to visible persistence, masking with simultaneous onset/asynchronous offset, line motion illusion, facilitation of visuospatial attention by precues, and several others. The theoretical implications of the present metatheory are discussed and links to other approaches outlined.