Spatial Cueing Effects Research Articles

Spatial cueing effects do not necessarily index spatial shifts of attention

Spatial cueing effects do not necessarily index spatial shifts of attention

Spatial cueing effect is not what we thought- An eye movement experiment

Spatial cueing effect is not what we thought- An eye movement experiment

The effects of spatial auditory and visual cues on mixed reality remote collaboration

Collaborative Mixed Reality (MR) technologies enable remote people to work together by sharing communication cues intrinsic to face-to-face conversations, such as eye gaze and hand gestures. While the role of visual cues has been investigated in many collaborative MR systems, the use of spatial auditory cues remains underexplored. In this paper, we present an MR remote collaboration system that shares both spatial auditory and visual cues between collaborators to help them complete a search task. Through two user studies in a large office, we found that compared to non-spatialized audio, the spatialized remote expert’s voice and auditory beacons enabled local workers to find small occluded objects with significantly stronger spatial perception. We also found that while the spatial auditory cues could indicate the spatial layout and a general direction to search for the target object, visual head frustum and hand gestures intuitively demonstrated the remote expert’s movements and the position of the target. Integrating visual cues (especially the head frustum) with the spatial auditory cues significantly improved the local worker’s task performance, social presence, and spatial perception of the environment.

Investigation of the impact of blur under mobile attentional orientation using a vision simulator.

It is well-known that correction of blur can improve visual perception. However, it is unclear how the beneficial effect of correction is affected by the regions of correction and the spatial uncertainty introduced by the retinal stimulation. The purpose of this study was two-fold: first, to compare the impacts of blur correction between isoeccentric locations of the visual field; and second, to evaluate the effect of spatial cueing in each corrected location on performing a simple task. Five subjects were asked to complete a simple detection task of a small dark spot stimulus presented randomly at four cardinal retinal locations (eccentricity: 5°) under manipulation of attention via an exogenous cue. Both clear and blurred targets were randomly displayed across the visual field and viewed monocularly through a vision simulator, used to minimize peripheral ocular aberrations. Results confirmed the advantage of clear vs/ blurred images under spatial uncertainty. It was also found that the visual benefit from blur correction is unequal at isoeccentric locations, even for a simple detection task. While manipulation of attention in the presence of spatial uncertainty significantly modulated response time (RT) performance, no differential effect was observed for clear and blurred stimuli, suggesting that attention has only a small effect on the optical benefit for a simple detection task when the display is depleted (no distractor). Those observations highlight the importance of field performance asymmetries in optical interventions and may offer useful implications for the design of extrafoveal refractive correction. Further studies are needed to elucidate how the focus of attention interacts with the perceived gain of vision correction.

Visual Attentional Bias Induced by Face Direction.

The effect of spatial cueing on eye gaze has been confirmed by a large number of studies, but the effect of spatial cueing on face direction and the impact of eye gaze on this effect are less known. In four experiments, we investigated the attentional bias induced by face direction. A modified paradigm of spatial cueing was adopted with stimuli that were static faces rotated by 90 or 45° to the left or right from the frontal view. To control the effect of eyes, face stimuli with eyes open and those with eyes closed were both used in each experiment. In Experiment 1, the facial cue (face rotated by 90°) and target were presented simultaneously, and the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the facial cue and target was set to be 300, 600, and 900 ms in Experiments 2 (face rotated by 90°), 3 (inverted face rotated by 90°), and 4 (face rotated by 45°), respectively. The response time of detecting the target position was recorded. The spatial cueing effects were nonsignificant in Experiment 1, in which the cue and target were presented simultaneously. However, significant spatial cueing effects of face direction were found in Experiments 2 and 3, in which the upright and inverted faces rotated by 90° were adopted, respectively, in both the eyes open and eyes closed conditions. In addition, we did not find an effect of spatial cueing with the face rotated by 45° (Experiment 4). Our results indicate that face direction can bias visual attention. This effect might not be based on the holistic processing of faces.

On the putative role of intervening events in exogenous attention.

In exogenous attention, two main behavioural effects are usually observed across time: facilitation at short cue-target onset asynchronies (CTOAs), and Inhibition of Return (IOR) at longer CTOAs. The presentation of an intervening event (IE)-i.e., a cue presented at fixation between the peripheral cue and target period-favours the appearance of IOR. However, although there is a general consensus on this empirical modulation, there is no agreement about the putative role of IEs and/or the mechanism/s underlying their effect. While some authors consider IEs as a "cue-back", automatically reorienting attention to fixation, thus allowing IOR to occur, others have considered IEs as events modulating cue-target integration processes, consequently affecting exogenous cueing. Even in this later case, it is not clear whether IEs modulate cueing by inducing an attentional set (top-down) modulation or by inducing a trial-by-trial (bottom-up) online modulation. To disentangle this issue, in two experiments, we manipulated the proportion of trials in which the IE was presented, thus being able to measure the effect of the presence/absence and proportion of IEs. We observed a gradual influence of the % of IEs over cueing effects, which becomes less positive or more negative as the % of IEs increases. This pattern of findings fits well with the idea that facilitation and IOR depend on cue-target integration processes, and presents critical implications for the open debate about the mechanism/s underlying exogenous spatial cueing effects.

The roles of relevance and expectation for the control of attention in visual search.

Representations of target-defining features (attentional templates) control the allocation of attention during visual search. We investigated whether template-guided attentional selectivity is sensitive not only to the relevance of visual features, but also to expectations about their probability. Search displays could contain a target in an expected (80%) or unexpected (20%) color. They were preceded by spatially uninformative cues that matched either the expected or unexpected target color. These color cues attracted attention, reflected by behavioral spatial cueing effects and by cue-elicited N2pc components obtained via EEG measured during task performance. Critically, these attentional capture effects were identical for both color cues, suggesting that preparatory attentional templates only reflect relevance, and are insensitive to expectations about target color probabilities. In contrast, RTs and N2pc components to search targets in the unexpected color were delayed, showing that expectations modulated the speed of attentional target selection within search displays. This dissociation between the effects of relevance and expectation on attentional preparation versus target selection suggests that these 2 parameters for attentional control are represented differently. Task relevance is likely to be specified at the level of individual features, whereas expectations could be represented in an object-based fashion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Evidence for early top-down modulation of attention to salient visual cues through probe detection.

The influence of top-down attentional control on the selection of salient visual stimuli has been examined extensively. Some accounts suggest all salient stimuli capture attention in a stimulus-driven manner, while others suggest salient stimuli capture attention contingent on top-down relevance. Evidence consistently shows target templates allow only salient stimuli sharing a target's features to capture attention, while salient stimuli not sharing a target's features do not. A number of hypotheses (e.g., contingent orienting, disengagement, signal suppression) from both sides of this debate have been proposed; however, most predict similar performance in the visual search and spatial cuing tasks. The present study combined a cuing task, in which subjects identified a target defined by its having a unique feature, with a probe identification task developed by Gaspelin, Leonard, and Luck (Psychological Science, 26, 1740-1750, 2015), in which subjects identified letters appearing in potential target locations just after the appearance of a salient cue that matched or did not match the target-defining feature. The probe task provided a measure of where attention was focused just after the cue's appearance. In six experiments, we observed top-down modulation of spatial cuing effects in response times and probe identification: Probes in the cued location were identified more often, but more when preceded by a cue that shared the target-defining feature. Though not unequivocal, the results are explained in terms of the on-going debate over whether top-down attentional control can prevent bottom-up capture by salient, task-irrelevant stimuli.

Sensory and decisional components of endogenous attention are dissociable.

Endogenous cueing of attention enhances sensory processing of the attended stimulus (perceptual sensitivity) and prioritizes information from the attended location for guiding behavioral decisions (spatial choice bias). Here, we test whether sensitivity and bias effects of endogenous spatial attention are under the control of common or distinct mechanisms. Human observers performed a multialternative visuospatial attention task with probabilistic spatial cues. Observers’ behavioral choices were analyzed with a recently developed multidimensional signal detection model (the m-ADC model). The model effectively decoupled the effects of spatial cueing on sensitivity from those on spatial bias and revealed striking dissociations between them. Sensitivity was highest at the cued location and not significantly different among uncued locations, suggesting a spotlight-like allocation of sensory resources at the cued location. On the other hand, bias varied systematically with cue validity, suggesting a graded allocation of decisional priority across locations. Cueing-induced modulations of sensitivity and bias were uncorrelated within and across subjects. Bias, but not sensitivity, correlated with key metrics of prioritized decision-making, including reaction times and decision optimality indices. In addition, we developed a novel metric, differential risk curvature, for distinguishing bias effects of attention from those of signal expectation. Differential risk curvature correlated selectively with m-ADC model estimates of bias but not with estimates of sensitivity. Our results reveal dissociable effects of endogenous attention on perceptual sensitivity and choice bias in a multialternative choice task and motivate the search for the distinct neural correlates of each.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Attention is often studied as a unitary phenomenon. Yet, attention can both enhance the perception of important stimuli (sensitivity) and prioritize such stimuli for decision-making (bias). Employing a multialternative spatial attention task with probabilistic cueing, we show that attention affects sensitivity and bias through dissociable mechanisms. Specifically, the effects on sensitivity alone match the notion of an attentional “spotlight.” Our behavioral model enables quantifying component processes of attention, and identifying their respective neural correlates.

Multisensory Integration and Exogenous Spatial Attention: A Time-window-of-integration Analysis.

Although it is well documented that occurrence of an irrelevant and nonpredictive sound facilitates motor responses to a subsequent target light appearing nearby, the cause of this "exogenous spatial cuing effect" has been under discussion. On the one hand, it has been postulated to be the result of a shift of visual spatial attention possibly triggered by parietal and/or cortical supramodal "attention" structures. On the other hand, the effect has been considered to be due to multisensory integration based on the activation of multisensory convergence structures in the brain. Recent RT experiments have suggested that multisensory integration and exogenous spatial cuing differ in their temporal profiles of facilitation: When the nontarget occurs 100-200 msec before the target, facilitation is likely driven by crossmodal exogenous spatial attention, whereas multisensory integration effects are still seen when target and nontarget are presented nearly simultaneously. Here, we develop an extension of the time-window-of-integration model that combines both mechanisms within the same formal framework. The model is illustrated by fitting it to data from a focused attention task with a visual target and an auditory nontarget presented at horizontally or vertically varying positions. Results show that both spatial cuing and multisensory integration may coexist in a single trial in bringing about the crossmodal facilitation of RT effects. Moreover, the formal analysis via time window of integration allows to predict and quantify the contribution of either mechanism as they occur across different spatiotemporal conditions.

Power and Vertical Positions in an Organization Chart: A Pre-Registered Replication Report of Study 3a and a Modification of Study 1a, Giessner & Schubert (2007)

Study 1a of Giessner and Schubert (2007) found a causal effect of vertical spatial cues on power judgments. Recent work showed that this was a false positive (Klein et al., 2018). Here, we test whether another paradigm (i.e., original Study 3a) can be replicated, and develop an adjusted paradigm of original Study 1a to clarify what kind of vertical spatial cues influence power judgments. Our current preregistered Study 1 confirms original Study 3a of Giessner and Schubert (2007). It shows that information about the power of a leader is represented spatially by placing the leader’s box higher in an organigram. Our current Study 2 distinguishes vertical ranks from magnitude of vertical spatial difference without changes in rank. The original Study 1a and the failed replication manipulated only magnitude while leaving rank equal. We confirm the null finding here. However, we also find that vertical rank order does indeed affect power judgments, again in a preregistered study, and in line with prior work. In sum, building on earlier work and the failed replication, we clarify that vertical rank order, but not magnitude of elevation, are associated with power judgments.

Different effects of spatial and temporal attention on the integration and segregation of stimuli in time.

Having expectations about when and where relevant stimuli will appear engenders endogenous temporal and spatial orienting and can provide vital benefits to visual processing. Although more is known about how each of these forms of orienting affects spatial processing, comparatively little is understood about their influences on the temporal integration and segregation of rapid sequential stimuli. A critical question is whether the influence of spatial cueing on temporal processing involves independent spatial and temporal orienting effects or a synergistic spatiotemporal impact. Here we delineated between the temporal and spatial orienting engendered by endogenous cues by using a paradigm with identical visual stimulation when the goal was to integrate or segregate the stimuli, in separate blocks of trials. We found strong effects of spatial orienting on both integration and segregation performance. In contrast, temporal orienting engendered only an invalid cueing cost, and for integration trials only. This clear differentiation between spatial and temporal cueing effects provides constraints to inform arbitration between theories of how attention biases the visual processing stream and influences the organization of visual perception in time.

The neglected contribution of memory encoding in spatial cueing: A new theory of costs and benefits.

Spatial cueing is thought to indicate the resource limits of visual attention because invalidly cued items are reported more slowly and less accurately than validly cued items. However, limited resource accounts cannot explain certain findings, such as dividing attention without costs, or attentional benefits without invalidity costs. The current study presents a new account of exogenous cueing, namely the memory encoding cost (MEC) theory, which integrates attention and memory encoding to explain costs and benefits evoked by a spatial cue. Unlike conventional theories that focus on the role of attention in yielding spatial cueing effects, the MEC theory argues that some cueing effects are caused by a combination of attentional facilitation evoked by the cue, but also the cost of encoding the cue into memory. The crucial implication of this theory is that limitations in attentional deployment may not necessarily be the cause of invalidity costs. MEC generates a number of predictions that we test here, providing five convergent lines of evidence that cue encoding plays a key role in producing cueing effects. Furthermore, the MEC suggests a common mechanism underlying cueing costs and the attentional blink, and we simulate the core empirical findings of the current study with an existing attentional blink model. The model was able to simulate these effects primarily through manipulation of a single parameter that corresponds to memory encoding. The MEC theory thus simplifies our theoretical understanding of attentional effects by linking the attentional blink and some varieties of spatial cueing costs to a common mechanism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

The Neglected Contribution of Memory Encoding in Spatial Cueing effects: A New Theory of Costs and Benefits

The Neglected Contribution of Memory Encoding in Spatial Cueing effects: A New Theory of Costs and Benefits

The impact of temporal contingencies between cue and target onset on spatial attentional capture by subliminal onset cues.

Prior research suggested that attentional capture by subliminal abrupt onset cues is stimulus driven. In these studies, reacting was faster when a searched-for target appeared at the location of a preceding abrupt onset cue compared to when the same target appeared at a location away from the cue (cueing effect), although the earlier onset of the cue was subliminal, because it appeared as one out of three horizontally aligned placeholders with a lead time that was too short to be noticed by the participants. Because the cueing effects seemed to be independent of top-down search settings for target features, the effect was attributed to stimulus-driven attentional capture. However, prior studies did not investigate if participants experienced the cues as useful temporal warning signals and, therefore, attended to the cues in a top-down way. Here, we tested to which extent search settings based on temporal contingencies between cue and target onset could be responsible for spatial cueing effects. Cueing effects were replicated, and we showed that removing temporal contingencies between cue and target onset did not diminish the cueing effects (Experiments 1 and 2). Neither presenting the cues in the majority of trials after target onset (Experiment 1) nor presenting cue and target unrelated to one another (Experiment 2) led to a significant reduction of the spatial cueing effects. Results thus support the hypothesis that the subliminal cues captured attention in a stimulus-driven way.

The development of object-based attention in infants

We examined whether infants aged 6–8 months show object-based attention using the preferential looking method. In object-based attention, which is a prerequisite function for efficient real-world processing of various stimuli, a target that appears at a cued object is detected and processed faster than a target appearing at an uncued object. We presented 6- to 8-month-old infants with the visual stimuli consisting of two white vertical rectangles side by side, in which a target appearing at 1) the cued location, 2) the end opposite to the cued location, and 3) another rectangle’s end following the cue, using an established paradigm, and measured each infant’s first saccade to the target. We found that (1) infants of all ages could make the first saccade to the target appearing at the cued location, (2) only 8-month-old infants made the first saccade to the target appearing at the opposite end to the cued location more accurately than to the target appearing at the other rectangle’s end. These results indicate that object-based attention might be acquired around 8 months compared with the spatial cueing effect that appears at around 6 months. Our findings suggest that the objects play a role in visual attention in 8-month-old infants.

The Joint Effects of Spatial Cueing and Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Visual Acuity.

The present study examined the mutual influence of cortical neuroenhancement and allocation of spatial attention on perception. Specifically, it explored the effects of transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) on visual acuity measured with a Landolt gap task and attentional precues. The exogenous cues were used to draw attention either to the location of the target or away from it, generating significant performance benefits and costs. Anodal tDCS applied to posterior occipital area for 15 min improved performance during stimulation, reflecting heightened visual acuity. Reaction times were lower, and accuracy was higher in the tDCS group, compared to a sham control group. Additionally, in post-stimulation trials tDCS significantly interacted with the effect of precuing. Reaction times were lower in valid cued trials (benefit) and higher in invalid trials (cost) compared to neutrally cued trials, the effect which was pronounced stronger in tDCS group than in sham control group. The increase of cost and benefit effects in the tDCS group was of a similar magnitude, suggesting that anodal tDCS influenced the overall process of attention orienting. The observed interaction between the stimulation of the visual cortex and precueing indicates a magnification of attention modulation.

MazeSuite 3: A design, presentation and analysis platform for spatial navigation, cognitive neuroscience and neuroengineering applications

MazeSuite 3: A design, presentation and analysis platform for spatial navigation, cognitive neuroscience and neuroengineering applications

Dissociating location-based and object-based cue validity effects in object-based attention

Encoding predictive information and allocating visual attention according to the probability distribution is one of the marvelous achievements of our visual system. Unlike previous studies on object-based attention in which the validity of location-based cues and that of object-based cues covaried, we differentiate the two and examine whether our visual system can calculate the usefulness of the cue based on, separately and independently, the probability distribution of location on one hand and object that contains multiple locations on the other. We adopted the cueing paradigm with the double-rectangle display (Egly, Driver, & Rafal, 1994) and manipulated cue validity with respect to a particular location or the object as a whole. Results showed a spatial-cueing effect when location-based cues were informative and a same-object advantage when object-based cues were informative. We thus demonstrate here that different kinds of cue validity (location-based vs. object-based) determine different attention effects respectively (spatial-cueing effect vs. object-based advantage).

If not When, then Where? Ignoring Temporal Information Eliminates Reflexive but not Volitional Spatial Orienting

A tremendous amount of research has been devoted to understanding how attention can be committed to space or time. Until recently, relatively little research has examined how attention to these two domains combine. The present study addressed this issue. We examined how implicitly manipulating whether participants used a cue to orient attention in time impacts reflexive or volitional shifts in spatial attention. Specifically, participants made speeded manual responses to the detection of a peripherally presented target that appeared either 100, 500, or 1000 ms after the onset of a central cue. Cues were either spatially non-predictive arrows (p = 0.50) or spatially-predictive (p = 0.80) letter cues. Whereas arrow cues can reflexively orient spatial attention even when non-predictive of a target’s spatial location, letters only orient spatial attention when they reliably predict a target location, i.e., the shift is volitional. Further, in one task, a target was presented on every trial, thereby encouraging participants to use the temporal information conveyed by the cue to prepare for the appearance of the target. In another task, 25% of trials contained no target, implicitly discouraging participants from using the cue to direct attention in time. Results indicate that when temporal information is reliable and therefore volitionally processed, then spatial cuing effects emerge regardless of whether attention is oriented reflexively or volitionally. However, when temporal information is unreliable, spatial cuing effects only emerge when spatial cue information is reliable, i.e., when spatial attention is volitionally shifted. Reflexive cues do not elicit spatial orienting when their temporal utility is reduced. These results converge on the notion that reflexive shifts of spatial attention are sensitive to implicit changes in a non-spatial domain, whereas explicit volitional shifts in spatial attention are not.