Enhancement of letter recognition by explicit and implicit cueing of transient focal attention

The intensity of a visual percept is controlled by physical stimulus variables like size, contrast and duration. In addition, there are internal conditions that influence the percept, like expectation, previous percepts (masking), or whether the stimulus is attended or unattended. This study shows that attending to the future target location in visual space can boost perception more than an equivalent lengthening of the target duration.