Abstract
Existing research has found that spatial attention alters how various stimulus properties are perceived (e.g., luminance, saturation), but few have explored whether it improves the accuracy of perception. To address this question, we performed two experiments using modified Posner cueing tasks, wherein participants made speeded detection responses to peripheral colour targets and then indicated their perceived colours on a colour wheel. In E1, cues were central and endogenous (i.e., prompted voluntary attention) and the interval between cues and targets (stimulus onset asynchrony, or SOA) was always 800 ms. In E2, cues were peripheral and exogenous (i.e., captured attention involuntarily) and the SOA varied between short (100 ms) and long (800 ms). A Bayesian mixed-model analysis was used to isolate the effects of attention on the probability and the fidelity of colour encoding. Both endogenous and short-SOA exogenous spatial cueing improved the probability of encoding the colour of targets. Improved fidelity of encoding was observed in the endogenous but not in the exogenous cueing paradigm. With exogenous cues, inhibition of return (IOR) was observed in both RT and probability at the long SOA. Overall, our findings reinforce the utility of continuous response variables in the research of attention.
Highlights
Attention is a broad term that refers to the allocation of processing resources in space, time and to activities [1]
We selected a Bayesian model for our data because we believe it to be a more robust and suitable method of implementing the Zhang and Luck [11] mixture model analysis because it avoids many of the problems inherent in frequentist statistics, and because we believe the results of a Bayesian model to be more intuitive to interpret than those of traditional statistical tests
Our study provides the first evidence for the effects of endogenous spatial cueing on the probability and fidelity of colour encoding
Summary
Attention is a broad term that refers to the allocation of processing resources in space, time and to activities [1]. Studies using visual stimuli that are near the threshold of perceptibility (i.e., very brief and/or faint) have found that spatial attention increases the likelihood that a stimulus will be consciously perceived (e.g., Chica et al [3]), and that this effect is largest when attention is elicited exogenously [4]. This suggests that reflexive spatial attention, and to a lesser extent voluntary spatial attention, improve the likelihood that visual stimuli will be perceived. Studies using stimuli above the threshold of perception have found that spatial attention influences how many properties of stimuli are perceived, including contrast [5,6], colour saturation [7], spatial
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