Testing the unified model of vision and attention: Effects of landmark features, stimulus identity and visual eccentricity on visual orienting and conscious discrimination

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe unified model of vision and attention (Lambert, A. J., Wilkie, J., Greenwood, A., Ryckman, N., Sciberras-Lim, E., Booker, L.-J., & Tahara-Eckl, L. [2018]. Towards a unified model of vision and attention: Effects of visual landmarks and identity cues on covert and overt attention movements. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 44, 412–432) was tested by examining effects of centrally and peripherally presented landmark and identity cues on attentional orienting. When presented centrally, both kinds of cue influenced attention; but, when presented peripherally, landmark cues affected attention, but identity cues did not. Effects of peripheral landmark cues on saccadic latencies and manual response times for discriminating between target stimuli were as large as those associated with central landmark cues. Because the dorsal stream represents peripheral vision quite well, whereas the ventral stream does not, these findings are consistent with our proposal that landmark cues tend to recruit dorsal stream encoding, while identity cues rely on ventral stream encoding. When participants discriminated consciously between stimuli employed as cues in the attentional orienting task, centrally presented stimuli were discriminated more rapidly than peripheral stimuli, regardless of cue type. This is consistent with the view that conscious discrimination of the stimuli used as landmark and identity cues in the orienting task, requires vision for perception and recruits ventral stream encoding.