The relationship between covert and overt attention in endogenous cuing

Abstract

In a standard Posner paradigm, participants were endogenously cued to attend to a peripheral location in visual space without making eye movements. They responded faster to target letters presented at cued than at uncued locations. On some trials, instead of a manual response, they had to move their eyes to a location in space. Results showed that the eyes deviated away from the validly cued location; when the cue was invalid and attention had to be allocated to the uncued location, eye movements also deviated away, but now from the uncued location. The extent to which the eyes deviated from cued and uncued locations was related to the dynamics of attention allocation. We hypothesized that this deviation was due to the successful inhibition of the attended location. The results imply that the oculomotor system is not only involved during the endogenous direction of covert attention to a cued location, but also when covert attention is directed to an uncued location. It appears that the oculomotor system is activated wherever spatial attention is allocated. The strength of saccade deviation might turn out to be an important measure for the amount of attention allocated to any particular location over time.