Further evidence in favor of prior entry from endogenous attention to a location in space

Abstract

Titchener's (1908) law of prior entry states that "the object of attention comes to consciousness more quickly than the objects which we are not attending to," or otherwise, that attended stimuli are perceived earlier than unattended stimuli. Shore, Spence, and Klein (Psychological Science, 12, 205-212. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00337 , 2001) showed that endogenous visuospatial orienting does in fact elicit prior-entry effects, albeit to a smaller degree than does exogenous visuospatial orienting. In disagreement with this finding, Schneider and Bavelier (Cognitive Psychology, 47, 333-366. doi: 10.1016/S0010-0285(03)00035-5 , 2003) found no effect of their instruction to attend. They concluded that nonattentional effects could masquerade as prior entry, which could account for findings such as those in Shore et al.'s endogenous condition. We investigated this empirical and theoretical discord by replicating the temporal-order judgment task used by Shore, Spence, and Klein, while manipulating and measuring endogenous orienting by way of an orthogonal color probe task. We showed evidence of prior entry as a consequence of endogenous orienting, supporting the conclusions of Shore, Spence, and Klein.

How Does Spatial Attention Influence the Probability and Fidelity of Colour Perception?

“…Additionally, our model provides some limited evidence that valid endogenous cues improved the fidelity with which colours were encoded. This pattern of results is consistent with the findings of Redden et al [15] and Redden et al [16], both of which found that biasing attention to one of two target locations in TOJ tasks using between-block instructions improved the probability and/or fidelity of the encoding of colour information. Building on these papers, our study provides the first evidence for the effects of endogenous spatial cueing on the probability and fidelity of colour encoding.…”

“…To date, little research has been done using the Zhang and Luck [11] colour wheel method to investigate the effects of spatial attention on conscious perception: to our knowledge, the only two attentional studies to use this analysis have been Redden et al [15] and Redden et al [16]. These two studies integrated the colour wheel into temporal order judgement (TOJ) tasks as a diagnostic to verify that attention was being biased towards the intended locations in space, and manipulated spatial attention endogenously via between-block instructions that informed participants where colour probes were more likely to appear.…”

“…Redden et al [15] found that endogenous attention improved both the probability and fidelity of colour encoding in participants that used the probe bias instructions to direct their attention. Redden et al [16] likewise found that endogenous attention improved the perception of colour targets, but found that the specific effects on fidelity and probability of encoding varied depending on the colour probe duration. To date, no studies using the mixed-modelling colour wheel method have been done exploring the influence of endogenous or exogenous spatial cues on the perception of colour, nor have any studies explored the effects of exogenous attention on the probability and fidelity of conscious perception.…”

No perceptual prioritization of non-nociceptive vibrotactile and visual stimuli presented on a sensitized body part

“…Other studies have pointed out that endogenous attentional changes, like the ones we were expecting after HFS, can lead to significant perceptual biases towards the attended location or modality, resulting in a prioritization of stimuli presented at the attended body site (e.g. 13 , 24 , 39 – 42 , 45 ). Taken together these results indicate that TOJ tasks are sensitive in detecting perceptual biases induced by exogenous and endogenous shifts in spatial attention.…”

“…Indeed, previous studies have reported a larger vertex negativity in response to sensory stimuli presented within the focus of attention 18 – 23 . Our hypothesis, that HFS would prompt an endogenous attentional deployment towards the stimulated arm leading to a perceptual bias, was tested by using a temporal order judgment (TOJ) task, a well-established method to assess perceptual biases 12 , 13 , 24 – 26 .…”