Spatial orienting of attention in stereo depth

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the spatial orienting of visual attention in depth under purely stereoscopic viewing conditions. Random-dot stereograms were used to present disparity-defined target stimuli that were either validly or invalidly cued in depth. In separate tasks, participants responded either to the relative depth of the target (protruding vs. receding) or to its shape (square vs. diamond). Stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) between an uninformative exogenous cue and target were varied from 250 to 600ms. For both tasks, mean response times (RTs) were shorter for validly than invalidly cued target depths and this RT advantage was essentially restricted to the shortest SOA of 250ms. These results indicate that attention can be reflexively allocated to locations in stereo depth under conditions of low perceptual load, and independent of whether depth is relevant to the task or not.