Exogenous cueing and visual latency: attention, response bias or sensory facilitation?

Abstract

Titchener (1908) developed his Law of Prior Entry, that attended stimuli enter consciousness more rapidly that unattended stimuli, based on multimodal experiments which seemed to show that stimuli presented to an attended modality were perceived prior to simultaneous stimuli presented to an unattended modality. More recently, Hikosaka, Miyauchi et al. (1993) and Stelmach & Herdman (1991) have shown that, within the visual modality, exogenous visual cues bias temporal order judgments in favor of the cued target, such that the cued target must be delayed relative to the uncued target in order for participants to be maximally uncertain about the order of the two targets. Jaskowski (1993) showed that the existence of the effect for endogenous cueing depends on the response options, and in any case, both Stelmach & Herdman (1991) and Shore, Spence et al. (2001) agree that the effect of endogenous cueing is smaller than for exogenous cueing. Frey (1990) and Shore, Spence et al. (2001) have shown that instructions can affect the size of the attentional effect on order judgments. From this literature it is clear that temporal order judgments can be affected by nonattentional factors. The reduction or elimination of the effect with the endogenous cues suggests that the exogenous cues may have effects on order judgments beyond simple attentional effects.