Spotlight failure in covert visual orienting

Abstract

An important property of visual orienting is that the metaphorical “beam” is aimed at a location in space, and should therefore affect performance on any stimuli that occur at attended (producing benefits) or nonattended (producing costs) locations. Three experiments are reported that challenge this property. We used a precuing paradigm in which centrally presented arrows indicated the likely location of a probable stimulus event, which the subject had to discriminate from’ an improbable event. In each experiment the probable stimulus-response pairing showed significant cuing effects (costs + benefits), whereas the improbable stimulus-response pairing did not. This finding suggests that covert endogenous (centrally presented cues) orienting is not well characterized by the spotlight metaphor. Under these conditions, subjects seem to be generating a more specific expectancy.