New Insights into Visuospatial Attention: The Spotlight Metaphor meets fMRI

Covert spatial orienting enhances perceptual capabilities in the part of the visual field one attends. This classical observation was made by Michael Posner and colleagues a quarter of a century ago and made them coin the classical metaphor of a 'spotlight' of attention. Beyond intuitive appeal, the virtue of any powerful metaphor comes from its simplicity, and the single spotlight metaphor has inspired a vast amount of psychological research centered on the question of how spatial attention modulates perceptual performance. While confirming Posner's basic observation the models emerging from these subsequent st…