Cm. Moore et H. Egeth, HOW DOES FEATURE-BASED ATTENTION AFFECT VISUAL PROCESSING, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 24(4), 1998, pp. 1296-1310
Five experiments are reported from which it is concluded that attendin
g on the basis of a stimulus feature (e.g., red) does not directly aff
ect the sensory quality of stimuli that possess that feature. Feature-
based attention was manipulated in a visual search task by providing i
nformation about the probability that the target would possess a given
feature (e.g., ''The target has a 1.0 probability of being red when p
resent.''). Feature-based attention failed to aid performance under ''
data-limited'' conditions (i.e., those under which performance was pri
marily affected by the quality of the stimulus) but did affect perform
ance under conditions that were not data limited (Experiments 1-3). If
attending to a feature had affected the sensory quality of stimuli, p
erformance should have been aided under all conditions. Experiments 4
and 5 provided converging support for this conclusion.