Stimulus discrimination following covert attentional orienting to an exogenous cue.

Abstract

Five experiments explored exogenous covert visual-attentional orienting following a brief peripheral cue. On each trial an attentional cue was followed by a stimulus in an empty field at 1 of 8 locations on an imaginary circle centered on the fixation point. The cued area size and the cue-target spatial relation were manipulated. Accuracy and response time were affected by the exogenous cue validity. Attention was allocated to a specific location in a visual quadrant: A target at an uncued location in a quadrant was not facilitated as much as target at the cued location, and a target in a different quadrant was inhibited in relation to a neutral condition. Cuing 2 locations in a quadrant was not as facilitative for targets at the cued locations or as inhibitive for targets at other locations compared with cuing a single location in a quadrant. Results are discussed in the context of several extent models of covert visual-spatial attention.

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Cited by (3)

1. Involuntary covert orienting is contingent on attentional control settings
   Folk, Charles L., Remington, Roger W., Johnston, James C. · 1992 · Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
2. Sources of attention-sensitive visual event-related potentials
   Gonzalez, Carlos M. Gomez, Clark, Vincent P., Fan, Silu, Luck, Steven J., Hillyard, Steven A. · 1994 · Brain Topography
3. Attention enhances contrast sensitivity at cued and impairs it at uncued locations
   Pestilli, Franco, Carrasco, Marisa · 2005 · Vision Research

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