Abstract
The time course of attention has often been investigated using a spatial cuing task. However, attention likely consists of multiple components, such as selectivity (resolving competition) and orienting (spatial shifting). Here we sought to investigate the time course of the selective aspect of attention, using a cuing task that did not require spatial shifting. In several experiments, targets were always presented at central fixation, and were preceded by a cue at different cue-target intervals. The selection component of attention was investigated by manipulating the presence of distractors. Regardless of the presence of distractors, an initial rapid performance enhancement was found that reached its maximum at around 100 ms post cue onset. Subsequently, when the target was the only item in the display, performance was sustained, but when the target was accompanied by irrelevant distractor items, performance declined. This temporal pattern matches closely with the transient attention response that has been found in spatial cuing studies, and shows that the selectivity aspect of attention is transient.
Highlights
Attention is the set of mechanisms that the brain uses to control incoming information, by selecting physically salient or behaviourally meaningful parts for further processing
For the Cue present condition, repeated measures ANOVAs with Distractor presence and stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) as withinsubject variables revealed a significant main effect of Distractor presence on overall accuracy (F (1, 9) = 14.32, p,.01), with higher accuracy in the Distractors absent condition compared to the Distractors present condition (M = .70, SD = .17 vs. M = .62, SD = .18)
A twoway mixed ANOVA was performed with group as a betweensubjects factor and SOA (10 levels) as a within-subjects factor
Summary
Attention is the set of mechanisms that the brain uses to control incoming information, by selecting physically salient or behaviourally meaningful parts for further processing. Studies using variations of the spatial cuing task [1] have provided evidence for the existence of a transient component of the attentional response. This temporal pattern of attention was described in detail by Nakayama and Mackeben [2]. When SOA was increased from 0 to 100 ms, target discrimination accuracy rose rapidly to its maximum, revealing a cue-induced enhancement of attention. This attentional enhancement was found to be transient, as accuracy declined when the SOA was further increased to several hundreds of milliseconds. This transient attention pattern has been found by others in studies of spatial attention [2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
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