Dealing with distractors in the spatial cueing paradigm can reflect the strategic influence of cognitive effort minimization rather than a limit to selective attention

ABSTRACT

Observers often forego using highly-valid spatial cues to guide attention when they can locate the target more easily without the cue. This evidence suggests that effortful cognitive control processes – specifically, spatial reference frame computations that underlie the comprehension of directional words – are invoked sparingly in symbolic spatial cueing tasks. The present study examined the extent to which observers would adopt a default strategy of full or only partial spatial word cue comprehension to exploit the percentage of trials in which disambiguation of opposing stimuli along the cued axis was mandatory in order to respond. The main results revealed that observers routinely processed directional information when it was frequently needed (on 95% of trials), while selectively processing directional information when it was seldom needed (on 5% of trials), presumably to exploit the extreme context manipulation and minimize the amount of cognitive demand incurred. Hence, target-distractor relationships can be harnessed to mediate cognitive control exertion.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual attention
• spatial semantics
• mental effort minimization
• symbolic control of attention
• spatial reference frames

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Joseph R. Pauszek http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4970-1804