Abstract
Attention is engaged differently depending on the type and utility of an attentional cue. Some cues like visual transients or social gaze engage attention effortlessly. Others like symbols or geometric shapes require task-relevant deliberate processing. In the laboratory, these effects are often measured using a cuing procedure, which typically manipulates cue type and its utility for the task. Recent research however has uncovered that in addition to spatial orienting, this popular paradigm also engages two additional processes—tonic alertness and voluntary temporal preparation—both of which have been found to modulate spatial orienting elicited by task-irrelevant cues but not task-relevant symbols. Here we assessed whether changes in tonic alertness and voluntary temporal preparation also modulated attentional orienting elicited by task-relevant social gaze and nonsocial arrow cues. Our results indicated that while the effects of spatial attention were reliable in all conditions and did not vary with cue type, the magnitude of orienting was larger under high tonic alertness. Thus, while the cue’s task utility appears to have the power to robustly drive attentional orienting, changes in tonic alertness may modulate the magnitude of such deliberate shifts of attention elicited by task-relevant central social and nonsocial cues.
Highlights
Spatial attention is engaged differentially depending on the type of attentional cue [1,2,3,4,5]
When we assessed the influence of tonic alertness and voluntary temporal preparation on spatial orienting elicited by task-relevant central gaze and arrow cues, we found that the magnitude of attentional orienting, i.e., the response times (RTs) difference between cued and uncued trials, became larger under high relative to low tonic alertness at the longest cue–target time
Motivated by recent work [2,17,18] indicating the sensitivity of attentional effects to cue types, task settings, and/or task-relevance, here we sought to determine whether changes in the cuing task parameters of tonic alertness and voluntary temporal preparation modulated spatial orienting elicited by task-relevant central directional gaze and arrow cues
Summary
Spatial attention is engaged differentially depending on the type of attentional cue [1,2,3,4,5]. While some cues like peripheral luminance changes engage attention relatively effortlessly in a reflexive manner, others like centrally presented geometric shapes engage attention in a more voluntary fashion, requiring deliberate effort. These effects are often studied using the Posner cuing task [3,6]. In this task, an attentional cue that indicates a potential target location is presented. If the cue has engaged attention, participants’ performance is facilitated (i.e., is faster and/or more accurate) for cued relative to uncued targets
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