Attention Excludes Noise. Does It Exclude Stochastic Resonance?

The most highly confirmed models of attentional psychophysics imply that focused attention, as compared to unfocused attention, always excludes, or filters out, both external and internal noise. This filtering action of attention would appear to exclude the possibility of stochastic resonance (SR) in the detection and discrimination of attended signals. In contrast, recent experiments have definitively demonstrated the presence of SR in detection and discrimination of (presumably attended) sensory signals by humans. Here we discuss this apparent conflict between theory and experiment, propose several alternative views of attention that do allow SR, and present the results of preliminary experiments intended to test our ideas.