Chapter 1. Spatial Cueing

1.1 Introduction

There are many aspects of attention; one is selective attention. The fact that we select part of the world to attend to means that other parts of the world, even most of the world, is ignored. In the visual domain, you can think of selective attention as a window that defines the region of the world from which we are receiving information. Or we can use the flashlight metaphor: What falls within the flashlight’s beam is what we attend to and what falls outside is not processed.

This experiment is designed to examine the flashlight. If there is an attentional flashlight, we should be able to focus our attention in different directions. But if we focus it in one direction, we should have problems responding to stimuli that fall outside the flashlight beam. This experiment will directly examine the question of what happens when you expect a stimulus from one direction but it appears from another.

Posner, M. I. (1980). Orienting of attention. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 32(1), 3-25.

1.2 Experiment Setup

Figure 1.1

1.3 Instructions

You will need to press the space bar to begin the experiment. At the beginning of the first trial, a fixation mark will appear. Please look at this mark. After it is removed, there will be a cue. The cue will be an arrow or a horizontal line as shown below:

Your job is to respond to the stimulus when it appears as quickly as you can, without anticipating the stimulus. Press J to indicate when the stimulus has appeared.

Keyboard Response

1.4 Experiment

Figure 1.2

1.5 Results

Figure 1.3

1.6 Quiz