The Effects of Spatial Endogenous Pre-cueing across Eccentricities

Abstract

Frequently, we use expectations about likely locations of a target to guide the allocation of our attention. Despite the importance of this attentional process in everyday tasks, examination of pre-cueing effects on attention, particularly endogenous pre-cueing effects, has been relatively little explored outside an eccentricity of 20°. Given the visual field has functional subdivisions that attentional processes can differ significantly among the foveal, perifoveal, and more peripheral areas, how endogenous pre-cues that carry spatial information of targets influence our allocation of attention across a large visual field (especially in the more peripheral areas) remains unclear. We present two experiments examining how the expectation of the location of the target shapes the distribution of attention across eccentricities in the visual field. We measured participants’ ability to pick out a target among distractors in the visual field after the presentation of a highly valid cue indicating the size of the area in which the target was likely to occur, or the likely direction of the target (left or right side of the display). Our first experiment showed that participants had a higher target detection rate with faster responses, particularly at eccentricities of 20° and 30°. There was also a marginal advantage of pre-cueing effects when trials of the same size cue were blocked compared to when trials were mixed. Experiment 2 demonstrated a higher target detection rate when the target occurred at the cued direction. This pre-cueing effect was greater at larger eccentricities and with a longer cue-target interval. Our findings on the endogenous pre-cueing effects across a large visual area were summarized using a simple model to assist in conceptualizing the modifications of the distribution of attention over the visual field. We discuss our finding in light of cognitive penetration of perception, and highlight the importance of examining attentional process across a large area of the visual field.

The effects of eccentricity on attentional capture

“…Possibly eccentricity acts in a similar manner, in that it operates on the values in the priority map through spatial gain control, such that less eccentric items receive stronger weights than those presented further away. This idea bears much resemblance to the central bias notion as proposed by Wolfe et al ( 1998 ) to account for the eccentricity effects in their study (see also Feng & Spence, 2017 ) and is also consistent with our finding that both target and distractor eccentricity affect capture. However, our results also showed that the effects of target eccentricity and distractor eccentricity were largely additive – in other words, the eccentricity of one item did not modulate the effect of the eccentricity of the other item.…”

Exogeneous Spatial Cueing beyond the Near Periphery: Cueing Effects in a Discrimination Paradigm at Large Eccentricities

“…Either, cueing effects rise with eccentricity (cueing near periphery < cueing medium periphery < cueing far periphery. This would constitute a quantitative difference between near, medium, and far periphery and is supported by rising cueing effects found in the near and medium periphery (e.g., [15,34,36] and several studies using peripheral cues in combination with a detection task failed to reveal cueing effects beyond the EOMR [16,[45][46][47]. This would constitute a qualitative difference between near and medium and the far periphery.…”

“…Nonetheless, knowledge about visual attention is restricted by an often-neglected factor: The size of commercially available computer screens. The majority of attention studies used target eccentricities up to 25 • of visual angle [10][11][12], in the rarer cases up to 30 • [13][14][15]. To my knowledge, only two studies, Casteau and Smith [16] and Poggel, Strasburger and MacKeben [17] investigated visual attention beyond 30 • [16], used eccentricities up to 44 • , and [17] even up to 60 • .…”

“…Additionally, eye movements were controlled in Experiment 2 for two reasons. First, many previous studies on visual attention, e.g., [15], do not control for eye movements or deviations from a fixation area because it is assumed that the cueing SOAs in these studies are too short for the occurrence of eye movements (<200-150 ms). However, occasionally occurring faster eye movements would affect the retinal position of stimuli in paradigms without eye movement control and might also enhance or reduce the size of cueing effects.…”