Training Under Attentional Competition Produces Persistent Biases in Visual Appearance

TL;DR

Training attention in the presence of sensory competition leads to lasting changes in perceived contrast, demonstrating that attentional learning can recalibrate visual appearance beyond immediate effects.

Contribution

This study shows that attentional training under sensory competition causes persistent perceptual biases, a novel finding linking attention, learning, and visual appearance.

Findings

Training under competition shifts perceived contrast at trained locations

No perceptual change occurs without distractor during training

Effects persist across different stimuli and task variations

Abstract

Selective attention can momentarily alter visual appearance, but can such effects be learned? We tested whether training attention under sensory competition produces lasting changes in perceived contrast. Across seven days, participants trained on an orientation task with a fixed target location, with or without a salient distractor. Before and after training, we measured the point of subjective equality (PSE). Training under competition produced a reliable push-pull shift. Stimuli at the trained location appeared higher in contrast, whereas stimuli at the untrained location appeared lower. Conversely, training without distractors improved performance but did not alter appearance. Crucially, these opponent shifts were robust to task variations, persisting even in equality judgments designed to minimize response bias. Furthermore, the effect generalized to stimuli with novel orientation and contrast levels. These findings demonstrate that resolving sensory competition does not merely improve discrimination, but durably recalibrates the subjective appearance of the visual world.