Preattentive perception

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Preattentive perception (from the Latin pre: before and attentio: attention ) is a preconscious, subliminal perception of sensory stimuli. It describes the phenomenon that a stimulus is perceived by a person's nervous system and triggers an effect, but does not penetrate the consciousness .

This is the rule in everyday life. A constant stream of stimuli flows into the organism, which is heavily filtered. Only potentially relevant stimuli penetrate consciousness. Most of the rest is only analyzed on a preconscious level in the brain .

This can be proven experimentally with a few tools. In the visual perception here comes Tachistoscope used. If a visual stimulus is presented in such a way that a clear image is created on the retina , it can be suppressed by an immediately following stimulus (so-called mask ) during certain presentation times . Here, however, only the conscious perception of the first stimulus is suppressed, not the physical perception. Therefore, the first stimulus can have an effect at lower processing levels (e.g. on motor response or sensation). However, this only works for very simple (symbols) or very clear (e.g. spider images) stimuli and not, as previously claimed in the media, for the presentation of company logos between the images on television.

Preattentive processing of stimuli could also be shown for acoustic and mechanical stimuli on the skin and in the intestine.

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literature